Instagram and TikTok Bolster Teen Safety Features
Meta has launched a new flagging system on Instagram to notify parents if their children search for self-harm or suicide-related topics. The system points users to support resources and alerts parents to the risky searches. Separately, TikTok introduced over 50 preset teen safety features, including default DM restrictions and content filters, signaling a move toward "safety by default" for younger users.
These platform changes arrive amid a global push for stricter regulation of social media's impact on minors, with new laws being enacted or considered everywhere from Australia to Europe and across the United States. In the U.S., at least 40 states have introduced legislation in 2024 aimed at protecting children online, with many laws requiring age verification or parental consent for users under a certain age. Instagram's parental supervision tools, first launched in the U.S. in March 2022, have been progressively expanding. Initially, they allowed parents to see how much time their teen spent on the app and set time limits. The platform later added features in 2024 called "Teen Accounts," which automatically place users under 16 into more restrictive settings, limiting who can contact them and what content they see. TikTok's "Family Pairing" feature, first introduced in 2020, allows parents to link their accounts to their teen's to manage settings. Over time, TikTok has added more granular controls, such as setting daily screen time limits, restricting who can comment on videos, and filtering video keywords. By default, the platform also disables direct messages for users under 16 and stops push notifications at night for all teen accounts. The latest updates are part of a broader industry trend toward "safety by design," a concept pushed by child safety advocates who argue that platforms should be inherently safe for young users, rather than placing the primary burden of safety on parents. This shift follows intense scrutiny and legal challenges against tech companies concerning their platforms' role in the youth mental health crisis and exposure to harmful content. These safety enhancements are also unfolding as TikTok attempts to address data privacy concerns through its $1.5 billion "Project Texas" initiative. This project aims to store all U.S. user data on domestic servers managed by Oracle, in an effort to prevent foreign access to American user data. However, the effectiveness of this separation has been questioned, with some reports alleging that U.S. user data was still being shared with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
