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Facebook app Instagram: improvements to the protection of minors
Photo: Thomas Trutschel / imago images / photothek
Instagram wants to do more to protect minors in the future.
To protect against unwanted contact requests, adults will in future be prevented from writing to users under the age of 18 by direct message if they are not already following them.
In addition, the photo and video platform from Facebook would like to increasingly rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning to find out whether children under the age of 13 register against their rules.
And Instagram also wants to encourage young people to keep their accounts private when they register, which means that their content is only visible to users who have confirmed it.
The changes apply worldwide, as Instagram announced on Tuesday.
TikTok's rules are stricter
Instagram seems to shy away from setting all accounts of under-16s to private by default, as competitor TikTok has recently done.
For a year now, TikTok has also banned under-16s from writing and receiving direct messages.
"We encourage young people to choose a private account and explain when they register what the difference is between a private and a public account," says Instagram manager Alexander Kleist.
Tests have shown that this significantly improves awareness of the difference between the profile types.
Young users who opt for a public account would later be advised by Instagram that the service recommends private profiles for them, it says.
Instagram is only officially 13 years of age
According to the rules of the platform, Instagram may only be used by children aged 13 and over.
When you register you will be asked for your age, but it happens again and again that younger children give the wrong age.
"Most of them are honest, but there are also people who use tricks and give the wrong age," says manager Kleist.
According to its own information, Instagram is already trying to find such users with the help of various data points.
However, the platform keeps a low profile on the details.
"We don't want to go into too much detail either, because we don't want to give people instructions on how to trick the system," says Kleist.
Youth advocates have often asked Instagram to do more to prevent adults from writing to children with false profiles, for example to initiate sexual contacts.
Just last week, an RTL show called "Attack on our children and what WE can do about it" drew attention to the dangers of so-called cybergrooming.
With the help of young-looking but adult actors and actresses, the program showed how quickly it can happen to children on the Internet that they receive unpleasant and sometimes deeply disturbing private messages from adults.
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mbö / dpa
