Meta strengthens protection for teenage users

The group Meta announced on Tuesday the creation of “Teenage Accounts”, aimed at better protecting underage users from the dangers associated with Instagram, an application accused by numerous associations and authorities of affecting the mental health of young people.

“This is an important update, designed to give parents peace of mind,” Antigone Davis, vice president of the California-based group responsible for security issues, told AFP.

In practice, Users between 13 and 17 years old will now have private accounts by default with guarantees about who can contact them and what content they can see.

Teenagers under 16 who want a public profile and fewer restrictions – for example, because they want to become influencers – will have to obtain permission from their parents. And this applies whether they are already registered or are new to the platform.

“It is a fundamental change (…) to ensure that we are really doing things right,” he said.

Adults will be able to monitor their children’s activities on the social network and act accordingly.even blocking the application.

The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger is also tightening its age restrictions.

“We know that teens can lie about their age, particularly to try to get around these protections,” Davis said. From now on, if a teen tries to change their birth date, “we will ask them to prove their age.”

For a year now, pressure has been mounting against the world’s number two in digital advertising and its competitors.

In October 2023, some forty US states introduced a complaint against Meta platforms accusing them of damaging “the physical and mental health of young people”due to the risks of addiction, cyberbullying or eating disorders.

Meta refuses to verify the age of all its users, in the name of respecting confidentiality. “If we detect that someone has lied about their age, we intervene,” says Davis, “but we don’t want to force 3 billion people to provide identification.”

Concern has reached such proportions that the top U.S. health official recently called for social media to be required to display information about the dangers faced by minors, such as warning messages on cigarette packets.

Regarding this restriction on teenagers, Casey Newton, author of the specialist newsletter Platformer, commented that “it is difficult to know to what extent Instagram’s announcement will satisfy the authorities.”