Meta announced on Tuesday a global upgrade to content control settings for teenage accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. The aim is to ensure underage users have an age-appropriate browsing experience. Social media platforms are currently facing increasingly stringent regulatory scrutiny concerning the mental and physical health and safety of minors.
This control initiative was first rolled out in select countries last October, with the original goal of preventing minors from encountering harmful or inappropriate content. Concurrently, Meta announced it will begin testing a new feature within Instagram designed to diversify the types of content shown to teenagers in their feeds, preventing them from repeatedly seeing posts on the same topic.
In April of this year, Meta had warned investors that new laws, regulations, and regulatory actions in the US and Europe, targeting issues of social media's impact on youth, could have a materially negative effect on the company's operational and financial performance.
In a landmark legal case, a Los Angeles jury ruled on March 25th that Meta and Alphabet were negligent, finding that their social media products cause harm to the mental and physical health of teenagers. The ruling ordered the two companies to pay a combined $6 million to a 20-year-old woman who described becoming addicted to social media as a child.
Meta stated that its tiered control system, which filters out content deemed unsuitable for users over the age of 13, is now the default setting for all teenage accounts.
The company added that a more restrictive 'Limited Content Mode' will be introduced on Facebook and Messenger later this year, further tightening content viewing permissions.
Instagram is piloting a new feature that limits how often teenagers see content from a single category, aiming to optimize the balance of content in their main feed and achieve a more varied distribution.
Meta explained, "We recognize that educational content on topics like nutrition, fitness, weightlifting, and managing anxiety has positive value. However, the platform needs to pair such content with a diverse range of other topics and should not continuously show the same type of content."
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