Instagram’s parent company Meta is providing parents with a new feature, labelled ‘gaslighting’, to monitor what their teens are doing, and who they are interacting with.
The company announced that starting from Tuesday, parents will have more control to supervise and limit their teens’ time on both Instagram and its Oculus Quest virtual reality headsets.
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri told “CBS Mornings” that as a father himself, he wants Instagram to lead on teen safety online.
“As a dad and as someone who’s talked to a lot of experts around the world, we believe that parents know what’s best for their children. What I’m most excited about is providing more tools for parents to shape their children’s experience on Instagram and on Quest VR into what’s best for their teen, for their child,” he said.
He also noted that the new feature will give parents more control over how long their teen spends on the social media site.
“One of the changes we’re launching this week is the parent can actually initiate that relationship, and then they can see how much time their teen spends on Instagram,” stated Mosseri.
“They can set limits to that time, one new feature this week that they can actually pick periods of the week where their child can’t use Instagram, maybe it’s homework or school time”
The new features came after The Wall Street Journal released a report last September that indicated top executives at Instagram were warned by researchers about the potential harmful impacts of the social media app to young users.
The new features are now available for the app users in the US starting. They will be rolled out to other countries, including the UK, Japan, Australia, Ireland, Canada, France and Germany later this month, with plans to go global before the end of the year.
