KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The start of this school year has been met with several concerns about kids and cell phones. A big part of the conversation - is social media.
Meta announced Instagram Teen Accounts last week. The company says the accounts will limit who can contact teenage users on the app, what content they see, and who they interact with. Teens under 16 will need parental permission to make the settings any less strict.
Screen Sanity is a local nonprofit that educates parents about kids and phones. The executive director told me that they’re grateful Instagram is applying these features. However, some were already available in all account settings.
“We're grateful for the increased attention and for parents getting involved. Hey, parents, read about these. Talk with your kids about why these are put in place. Why it's helpful to have a phone in sleep mode, why it's helpful to not get DMS from strangers. So, we're celebrating that, and yet we think it falls short in some ways,” said Tracy Foster, Screen Sanity Executive Director.
Meta’s goal is to make the app a safer place for teens. There are currently two bills making their way through Congress that have the same goal: Regulating social media for kids' online safety.
Congress hasn’t addressed legislation regarding regulating online platforms since 1998.
Both kids' online safety bills passed the senate 91-3 in the summer, so it's still up in the air if the government will have more power to regulate tech companies.
“The more that parents can be showing in mass, that we care about these issues, that parents or Congress or whoever, the more that these things are going to happen. Instagram only introduced these policies, this teen account approach, because of public pressure. So, I think it's an encouragement to all of us to say, hey, we can choose different paths,” said Foster.
She thinks there’s still a lot more to be done.
“We're now at this stage where it's like, oh, some things are good, but oh, some things are bad. In almost any period of rapid social change, after you start to get that data, you say, hey, let's put some guard rails on this so that we can use it most effectively,” said Foster.
Since last week, any teens that signed up new to Instagram will automatically have a teen account and Meta will start changing existing accounts over this week.
KSHB 41 reporter Olivia Acree covers portions of Johnson County, Kansas. Share your story idea with Olivia.
