Instagram head Adam Mosseri first testified before the US Congress on Wednesday, December 8, and talked about innovations for the safety of children and adolescents.
Members of the Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee on Commerce asked the Instagram chapter on advertising targeting youth, how the platform promotes inappropriate content, and what legal options are available to users affected by the social network.
“Our nation is in the midst of an adolescent mental health crisis. Social media didn’t create it, but they obviously fuel it and add fuel to the fire. And no one has any doubts about the potential harm that social media can do, ”said Senator Richard Blumenthal.
According to him, the company Facebook (which includes Instagram) is aware of the “destructive consequences of their algorithms” that provoke addiction and depression of adolescents from the social network.
In turn, Mosseri replied that he believes in the positive power of the Internet and, in particular, Instagram in the lives of young people. He also presented some of the innovations that the platform plans to introduce.
“We are creating a number of options to check if the user is really old enough to use Instagram. We are creating new technology to search and delete accounts of those under 13 years old. We also use technology to understand whether our users are under or over 18 years old, “- said the head of the company.
In addition, thanks to the new Instagram algorithms, adult users cannot write to minors if they do not follow them. Adults also won’t be able to tag teens under the age of 18 without a Minor’s subscription.
Mosseri also described the work of a new parental control tool that will allow you to see how much time teens spend on a social network and set a time frame.
As noted by Bloomberg, Instagram’s new features have sparked skepticism from some lawmakers. They argue that these measures are insufficient to protect children.
The fact that Instagram will have a number of new features aimed at the safety of teenagers on the Internet, Mosseri wrote on November 24 on his Twitter page.
Prior to that, on November 10, Adam Mosseri announced that Instagram began testing a new tool to remind users to take a break from watching the feed. The feature, called Take a break, will allow you to receive a reminder from within the application to take a break after a user-selected amount of time.
Instagram’s impact on teens came to the fore earlier this year after The Wall Street Journal and a media consortium released a series of critical reports based on internal documents disclosed by Facebook informant Frances Haugen. The documents reveal how the company’s social media platforms are spreading hate speech and misinformation and harming the mental health of vulnerable teens.
Source: IZ
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
