This may well be the culmination of a journey that hasn’t been easy and may still prove to not be so as time unfolds. In 2021, Meta said they were pausing the development of something they’d referenced as “Instagram Kids”, the contours of some sort of parental supervision over children who use the social media platform, remained bleak. The choice then was to build supervision tools, a journey that may have finally culminated with mandatory parental controls for kids under 16 years (and above the age of 13 years) of age. Think of it as an Instagram for teens.
Meta says this will essentially be a new form of an account, and all existing Instagram-ing teenagers will have to switch and abide by the new rules in play. Aside from supervision tools that’ll give parents control over who can (and who cannot) contact their child on the social network, these teen accounts will also have sensitive content control enabled at its highest setting, tagging on posts only by people they follow, a sleep mode that turns on between 10 PM and 7 AM, which will mute notifications overnight, as well as telling teens to get off the app after 60 minutes of Instagram work in a day.
The timeline for this rollout is phased, with a plan to switch all Teen Accounts within 60 days in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, with all account holders below the age of 16 years being switched to Teen Accounts in the European Union later this year. Meta also says Teen Accounts will roll out globally in January. “We’ll also bring Teen Accounts to other Meta platforms next year,” is a promise the tech giant makes.
Teen Accounts builds on a new content policy for accounts of young users on Instagram, which rolled out in January. That included active removal of certain types of content, such as self-harm, from their feeds. Mind you, some level of parental controls for Instagram profiles have been around since 2022, but many layers were optional and often required teens to opt-in for greater controls. Which teen would? Not many, to be fair.
But would this be enough, considering Meta regularly faces multi-pronged criticism—that the company prioritises money and advertising revenue over actual measures to moderate content, and no measures thus far have been enough to ensure teens’ safety on the platform? Last month, HT reported that 19 members of the US Congress wrote a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, asking for an explanation as to why Meta is allowing drug dealers to post ads on the company’s social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram. This followed an earlier report by the watchdog group Tech Transparency Project, which found more than 450 ads on Instagram and Facebook selling an array of pharmaceuticals and other drugs.
You may be wondering how Meta intends to find teens who may have lied about their age when setting up the profile, in an attempt to circumvent prevalent and expected content moderation and restriction measures. Age verification is one, that will be done in more layers across Meta’s services (you may not often remember how many times you’ve lied if you’ve lied; it’s a limitation of human nature). That’s not all, and there’s a whiff of artificial intelligence (AI).
“We’re also building technology to proactively find accounts belonging to teens, even if the account lists an adult birthday. This technology will allow us to proactively find these teens and place them in the same protections offered by Teen Account settings,” Meta says, in a statement. This will roll out first in the US next year.
A compelling argument for smart glasses?
On a day when tech company Snap announced their fifth generation augmented reality glasses Spectacles with a richer, more immersive display experience, Meta and EssilorLuxottica confirmed an extension to their partnership that has already seen some level of success with two generations of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, since 2019. (Something for trivia enthusiasts—the first generation launched in late 2021, was called Ray-Ban Stories, and came about before Facebook rebranded to Meta.)
It is what they say is a new long-term agreement, “under which the parties will collaborate into the next decade to develop multi-generational smart eyewear products.” The smart glasses, which particularly impressed in the $300 (around ₹25,000) second generation launched last year, have since adopted new capabilities with a broader release of Meta AI, the multimodal intelligence assistant—its toolset includes identifying and detailing what you see, a photo and video camera, as well as translations.
Meta and Ray-Ban do not officially sell smart glasses in India at this time.
No new smart glasses have been announced at this time, but considering this Meta and EssilorLuxottica partnership extension comes just ahead of the Meta Connect summit later this month, we could perhaps get a first glimpse at the third-generation smart glasses. Or maybe not.