Meta announced new features this Tuesday to support teens and families to make it easier to manage the time they spend on Instagram and Facebook, including parental controls and alerts tools.
In a statement, the tech points out that “these innovations on Instagram and Facebook come on the heels of the success of recent launches such as Take a Break, Parental Supervision Tools on Instagram and Silent Mode, which launched earlier this year.”
Now the new features, which will be available in a few weeks, include “new tools for Instagram parental controls” where parents have the option to see how many mutual friends their teen has with their followers and with the accounts they follow, and “new alerts to help teens manage their time on Facebook and Instagram”.
This includes “a notification if they spend more than 20 minutes on Facebook, encouraging them to take a break from the app and setting daily limits” and “a warning on Instagram suggesting they disable the app if they watching ‘reels’ night”.
Another feature is silent mode, “designed to help teens focus and establish healthy boundaries with friends and followers” and will be “available globally in the coming weeks, after initially launching in some countries at the start of the year”.
It adds “new restrictions to protect people from unwanted direct message requests”.
As of now, “you can only send a direct message request to someone who isn’t following you – and it’s only possible to send other message requests once the user accepts the request to speak in ‘chat’,” it reads as not announced.
“These message requests are limited to text only, meaning people can only send images and videos to someone who isn’t following them after the recipient accepts the request to speak in ‘chat,'” meaning the people won’t send any unsolicited images or receive more videos from people who don’t follow them.
Source: DN
