How to use Instagram safely, in view of the new school year, here is a short guide with all the tips and functions for privacy and security.
First of all, to have an Instagram account you must be at least 13 years old.
"We are working very hard to protect people on the platform, especially teenagers, and to ensure safe and enjoyable experiences. That's why we just introduced a new feature: children under 16 who sign up for Instagram have defaulted to. "Show less sensitive content" option. In this way, younger people will have less opportunity to come across content that they may find unpleasant in "Explore", in the search function, in the Reels, in the section dedicated to suggested accounts, in the hashtag pages and in the Contents section of the Feed.
If you already have an account, you can manage this type of content through the "Sensitive Content Control" tool: in "Settings" → "Account" → "Sensitive Content Control".
We advise you - they communicate from the social network - to choose “Less”, so as to view less content that you may find inappropriate ".
Here are
some tips to protect yourself from unwanted contacts:
Set your profile private
: on Instagram you can always set your account as private.
This allows you to control who sees or responds to your content.
With the private account, in fact, people will have to follow you in order to see your posts, your stories and your reels and all requests to follow the account must be accepted by you.
People whose request you have not accepted cannot comment on your content and will not see anything, not even in the “Explore” section or in the hashtags.
You decide who can contact you:
simply access "Settings", "Privacy", "Messages" and, from "Message Control" to decide who can write to you.
It is important that everyone, but especially young people, have control over who sends them messages and that they do not receive unwanted messages from people, especially adults, who they do not know.
Block or report
users and content that annoys: from the "Privacy" section of the "Settings" you can also block accounts with which you do not wish to interact.
Comments from a blocked account will no longer be visible.
Instagram also prevents an already blocked user from contacting you again via a new account.
We encourage you to report an account or content that you think is violating our rules to the Instagram team.
Set "Hidden Words"
to automatically hide offensive comments that contain words, phrases or emojis deemed offensive based on your personalized list.
Comments or direct messages featuring these terms will be hidden, so they won't be shown to you or your followers.
This function is activated from the “Settings”, “Privacy”, “Hidden words” section.
Here are some useful tools to have control of the experience on Instagram and keep it always positive:
Check the time you spend in the app
- In the Activity Dashboard, you can see how much time you spent on the platform the previous day and week, as well as the average time spent in the app.
From here you can also set a "Daily Reminder" to determine how much time you want to spend on Instagram during the day.
A notification will notify you when you have reached the agreed limit.
“Take a Break”:
This feature allows you to decide how much time to spend on Instagram.
To activate it, simply access: "Settings", "Account", "Your activity", select "Set break reminder" and schedule a reminder that will remind you to take a break from Instagram after some time browsing the platform .
Control the number of "likes" to focus on the photos and videos you share and not just how many "likes" a post receives. Instagram gives everyone the ability to hide the number of "likes" for all posts viewed in the Feed from the "Posts" section in the "Privacy" of the account in "Settings". It is also possible to decide from time to time whether to hide the number of "Likes".
Set positive comments high,
an easy way to encourage positive interactions.
The “Pin your favorite comments” feature allows you to set a tone for your account and interact with the community by pinning a certain number of comments at the top of the conversation.