Instagram has new parental controls to help moderate use for teens

Amid eight recently filed lawsuits that claim its platforms have been harmful to its teenage users, Meta has just announced the addition of more parental controls and digital well-being features for its popular photo and video sharing app, Instagram.

On Tuesday, Meta announced a series of “new tools and resources” for teens and their parents to help better regulate the former’s consumption of content on Instagram. It’s worth noting here that Instagram is one of the platforms included in the lawsuits against Meta.

Two mobile screenshots of Instagram's Take a Break reminders. — Meta/Instagram

And now, Instagram is rolling out a laundry list of new features for parents and teens to help ensure a safer experience on Instagram and moderate teens’ usage of the platform. These new features include the following:

Parents can now send invites to their teens to enable supervision tools. Before, teens had to send invitations to their parents. Now parents can send invitations to request that supervision tools be enabled.
Parents can view additional information about accounts or posts that their teen reported. If a teen reports an account or post, parents can see who was reported and the type of issue that was reported.
Parents can now schedule a time for when they’d “like to limit their teen’s use of Instagram.” Parents can set time limits and schedule breaks from Instagram, in which they’re not allowed to use it.
New app notification “nudges.” These notifications will suggest to teen users that they may want to view a different topic if they keep looking at the same subject in Explore.
New reminders that tell teens to enable the Take a Break feature. Instagram launched the Take a Break feature in December of last year. The feature displays a suggestion that a given user takes a break from Instagram if they have been scrolling for a while. It also suggests that users “take more breaks in the future” by enabling reminders for them. Instagram is now adding these new reminders that will suggest to its teen users to enable the Take a Break feature “when they’ve been scrolling in Reels for a period of time.”