To improve the company’s safety for underage users, Instagram has developed what are referred to as teenage accounts which are created with some privacy settings and options for parents. This update, therefore, seeks to foster improved privacy and overall safety for teenage audiences as well as about the negative effects of social media, such as the impact on their mental health. These changes are meant to empower teenagers to have more control over what they are sharing on social media platforms, besides helping parents to easily track the social media accounts of their children. 
 

Instagram’s new privacy settings guarantee that any subsequent accounts created by users who are below the age of 18 will be private, and therefore, any message they post will only be visible to specific people, and they will only receive direct messages from people they know. This is a change from the previous default public settings, which was seen as a way of preserving the freedom of young users from getting harassed and bullied among other forms of uncomfortable interactions. Though, teens can always convert their profile to a public one if they so wish, the default setting for a teen profile protects the individual from revealing a lot of information to the public. 
 

Highlights 

1- Instagram has recently released Teen Accounts that come with privacy features that automatically set the account to private for anyone under the age of 18. 
 

2- Menu for parents, which enables them to regulate the amount of time that the child spends on the Instagram as well as who the child is communicating with. 
 

3- They are among the measures that the platform has been making to safeguard the young generation and make Instagram safer for them. 
 

Among the chief characteristics of this rollout, the reader will identify improved settings of parental control. The new feature lets parents connect their accounts with their teens so that they can control the time spent, monitor the history, and see who the children follow and communicate with. This openness offers parents higher control over accounts that their kids use, and; therefore, helps to minimize chances of kids being bullied online or coming across content that is not suitable for them, or interacting with unsuspicious profiles. Parents will also be notified of any significant change in the status of their child’s account, for instance, from private to public.

That is why Instagram has also made some changes to reduce the ways in which adolescents can be reached by unknown individuals and/or older people they did not approve. Parents and other unrelated people who come across a teenager’s profile will neither be able to send him or her messages nor be able to consume her or his content, thus minimizing the chances of wrongdoing. 

It forms part of Meta’s, Instagram’s parent company, ongoing campaign to ensure that social media is safer for young people. Considering that social networks have negative impacts on the user’s psychological status, especially adolescents, new additions to the site offer steps to reduce the adverse effects of social networking, especially Instagram.

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