DALLAS — In September, Instagram announced new safety features aimed at teen users, a sweeping set of changes the social media giant said should provide parents with peace of mind.
“They’re an automatic set of protections for teens that try and proactively address the top concerns that we’ve heard from parents about teens online,” said Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri in an interview with Good Morning America’s Michael Strahan.
Those protections include automatically setting teen accounts to private, limiting what they can see and share and who can message them.
Instagram has faced a flood of complaints from critics over a lack of effort fighting online dangers like cyberbullying, sextortion, negative mental health effects and even access to online drug sales. More than 30 states are suing Instagram’s parent company, Meta, over claims that Instagram is too addictive for kids. The company counters, saying these features should help.
But many parents and online child safety advocates say they don’t go far enough. They contend it’s too easy for teens to bypass these features and they’re merely an attempt by Meta to avoid governmental oversight.
“It sounds great. Except it doesn’t even do the things that they say it’s going to do,” says Shelby Knox from Parents Together, a non-profit family advocacy group.
Knox says this move won’t meaningfully make Instagram safer for kids and it forces parents to manage safety. She argues that should be Instagram’s responsibility.
“There’s no other product our kids touch that doesn’t have to be designed to keep our kids safe,” Knox says. “And yet we have a product they keep in their pocket, they take to school, they go to sleep with at night. And it is entirely unsafe.”
Congress has talked about regulating social media networks. A proposed bill nicknamed KOSA – the Kids Online Safety Act – overwhelmingly passed in the Senate this summer by a bipartisan vote of 91-3. But after social media companies pushed back hard, spending millions on lobbying efforts, its prospects in the House of Representatives appear murky.
Knox calls this resistance to basic legislation a clear example of tech companies putting profits over people.
“Their business model is keeping kids online, on their product so they can collect data and sell it to advertisers,” Knox says. “Their bottom line isn’t really interested in keeping our kids safe.”
Without meaningful regulation or effective safety features, what can parents do to protect their kids online?
Online safety advocates recommend taking a series of steps, staring with delaying phone and social media access as long as possible, at least until age 13. They suggest parents have honest conversations with kids about what they might see in their feed and walk them through what to do if they receive messages from strangers. Experts tell parents to keep tabs on what their kids post and say device usage should be off-limits behind closed doors, especially in a child’s bedroom at night.
Until the business model from the big tech companies change, these may be the best steps to protecting your kids from the risks of being online.
“They are designing these products to keep your kid’s eyeballs so that they can sell their data,” says Knox. “If that’s their main motive, then kid’s safety is never going to be a priority.”