Facebook has announced new updates for Instagram, aiming to strengthen the safety of teenagers using its platform. Among the new measures that the social media giant will take to ensure the safety of its users is the blocking of adults from sending messages to teenagers. This way, adults will not be able to easily send messages to teenagers. In addition, the platform will encourage its minor users to have private accounts, while it will also send security alerts in direct messages (DMs).
Many of the changes focus on direct messages, where Instagram users can chat privately. There is also a particular emphasis on increasing the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify the real ages of users using the platform.
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Among the new features is the blocking of adults from sending messages to people under 18 who they don't already follow. In other words, adult users will only be able to send direct messages to teens who follow them. This means that whenever an adult user tries to send a message to a minor who doesn't follow them, they'll get a notification from Instagram that direct messages aren't available.
Instagram said: “While many people are honest about their age, we know that young people may lie about their date of birth. We want to do more to prevent this, but verifying people’s ages online is complex, and our industry is working to solve it. To address this challenge, we’re developing new artificial intelligence and machine learning technology that will help us keep our teens safer and implementing new age-appropriate features.”
Teens will also be sent “advisory” messages, advising them to be cautious in their conversations with adults. Instagram will notify young users when an adult, who is behaving suspiciously, interacts with them in DMs.
This data will be collected and analyzed by artificial intelligence, the company explains, which will be able to tell if an adult is sending a large number of friend requests or messages to people under 18, for example.
Instagram will also make it harder for adults who have displayed suspicious behavior to find teen accounts by blocking them from appearing in the “Suggested Users” tab or in the Explore and Reels (the TikTok “clone”) tab.
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Instagram will encourage young people to have private accounts by sending them a notification "outlining the benefits of a private account and reminding them to check their settings.".
Instagram also said it will add more features and additional privacy settings in the coming months.
The company has been trying to stop sexual abusers using its platform to communicate with teenagers and children. Sexual harassment and abuse crimes have increased by a third in a year as pedophiles turn to Instagram to target teenagers and children, the NSPCC in 2019.
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In the last two years, Facebook-owned apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp) and Snapchat were used in more than 70% of such criminal cases, while Instagram was used in over 1/4 of the cases.
