Meta announced yesterday (Tuesday) a series of new tools designed to help young people and their parents use its platforms in a more controlled, secure and efficient way.
The announcement comes in the shadow of much criticism of children and teens' addiction to social networks and the negative impact of distributed content.
Among the negative effects: bullying, poor body image, endless comparison to other young people, anxiety, loss of sleep and more.
The innovations are currently being launched in selected countries and will later be expanded to other countries.
Most of the innovations are related to Instagram: First, when the social network recognizes that teens' accounts are exposed to a lot of content on a particular topic, it will send them alerts that will encourage them to explore other topics.
Also, teens who have spent many hours in front of the screen will be asked to take a break from using the net in favor of other activities, preferably those that do not involve smartphones.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Photo: AP
The second significant update to Instagram is specifically for parents and guardians, who will now be able to send their children a request for access to control their account (until now, the child had to invite the parents on his own initiative).
In addition, parents will be able to limit their children's hours of use of Instagram, and get more information when children report an abusive post (who posted the post and for what reason they reported it).
In any case, in order to maintain the privacy of the youth, they will still be asked to agree to the access requests.
Meta's third announcement deals with Quest virtual reality glasses.
They incorporate tools for parental control for the first time, such as: approval to download applications that the child is interested in purchasing, restricting inappropriate content for the user's age, monitoring the children's screen time, viewing their friends list and more.
Here, too, it is a soft and spotty launch, which will be gradually expanded to other countries.
But will these additions really help reduce the negative effects that result from excessive use of social networks?
time will tell.
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