Instagram and Facebook under parental supervision: Meta expands the supervision of teenagers

According to Meta’s announcement, starting today parents and guardians using the monitoring tool will be able to see general categories of interests that teenagers engage in on Instagram, meaning topics that influence the algorithm that recommends content to them. The parents won’t necessarily see every video, photo or post that the boy or girl has seen, but will get broader information about the directions in which the algorithm is drawn: sports, photography, music, musicals, fashion, games or similar interests.

The innovation is based on a tool that Instagram launched last December, which allows users to influence their algorithm and choose to see more or less content from certain areas of interest. This tool has so far worked in Brills and Explore in English-speaking countries, and Meta says that it is expected to come to the main feed later as well. Now, within Parental Controls, parents will be able to access general categories from within the same mechanism, to better understand why the content shown to their children changes over time.

Next, Meta plans to send parents in select countries notifications when a teen adds a new interest to their algorithm. If a teenager added, for example, an interest in basketball, photography or musicals, the algorithm may start showing him more content from these areas. The parent will receive a general indication of this, and can click on the area of ​​interest to better understand the context. The company emphasizes that the new feature is available worldwide in the English language, but has not indicated at this stage when it will be extended to other languages.

Meta wants to present the move as a tool for family conversation, and not as a complete monitoring tool for every action of the child. According to the company, supervised teens will see that the parent or guardian can view the general categories of interests they want to see more of, but not the list of personal content in their feed. In this way, Meta tries to balance the desire of parents to understand what their children are busy with and the need of teenagers for a certain privacy.

The move comes amid continued expansion of youth accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. By default, these accounts include stricter privacy settings, restrictions on who can contact teens, and tools designed to reduce exposure to inappropriate content. Meta states that even if a boy or girl chooses certain areas of interest, some of the content will still not be shown to them due to protections intended for ages 13 and up, and due to the company’s community rules that prohibit certain content.

The second part of the update concerns the management of parental supervision in one place. Meta announced that Family Center will now be a single hub where parents can manage supervised accounts on Instagram, Meta Horizon, Facebook and Messenger. Instead of entering each application separately, parents will be able to see the main settings and manage supervision from one place. Meanwhile, parents will be able to send a single invitation to their son or daughter to start supervision in several Meta services, and not set up supervision anew in each application.

In the coming months, according to Meta, parents will also be able to get a broader picture of the youth’s activity in the company’s apps, for example cumulative usage time of several services. The company says that during the coming year it will continue to expand the monitoring tools, with the aim of allowing parents to more easily find the important settings, receive more significant information about their children’s activities, and support safer use of applications.

The expansion of Meta’s monitoring tools comes in the shadow of a growing global trend of restricting the use of children and teenagers in social networks. In recent years, more countries have begun to promote legislation or regulatory measures designed to keep young children off the networks, require age verification, or impose greater responsibility on companies to protect minors. The most notable move is in Australia, where a ban on the use of social networks for children under the age of 16 has been approved, a step that has become a symbol of a policy change in the relationship between children, screens and technology companies.

Similar discussions are also taking place in other countries, against a background of growing concern over exposure to offensive content, addiction to screens, damage to body image, cyberbullying and possible effects on the mental health of teenagers. In this reality, Meta’s new monitoring tools are not only a technical upgrade for parents, but also an attempt by the company to show that it is ahead of the regulation and offers its own protection mechanisms. The question that remains open is whether partial transparency about the interests of the algorithm will be enough in the face of growing calls for much stricter measures, to the point of preventing children from using social networks in the first place.