Instagram makes accounts private by default for teenagers

Instagram makes accounts private by default for teenagers

Many social media platforms or applications, which are being used worldwide by all age numbers, are coming under strict laws, especially after the announcement of the Online Safety Bill from the USA lawmakers. Therefore, many social networking apps have been restricting their advertisers from the data of their users. The social media giant – Facebook has also removed various suspicious accounts that were alleged of spam and false information. To overcome the privacy situation of users, Facebook, as well as many social media platforms, have been making the accounts (especially the accounts of teenagers) private, so that

Facebook-owned photo-sharing application – Instagram has made certain changes for users that are under the age of 16. Notably, in some countries, the age restriction is also under 18.

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After the new update on the application, when a child under 16 makes his/her account, the system will automatically make the account private by default. While in the case of the already existing account of kids, they will receive a notification as well as a guidance video. In that video, they will be guided about the benefits of the private account. In addition to this, they will get step to step procedure of changing their public accounts to private. Meanwhile, the adults will also be warned or might get their accounts temporarily blocked if they interacted with teens in a bad manner by using bad language.

The changes were made after the social media giant conduct testing or a survey. In their survey, their target audience was kids under the age of 16. The results of the tests were shocking as 80 percent of the children chose the private account instead of the public.

Interestingly, Facebook also claimed that the company is trying to make an accurate method for the verification of the age of their users. So that they know to whom they should apply the policy of private accounts. According to the company, they have been using Artificial Intelligence for a very long time for determining the users’ age. But now, they are expanding AI to the next level for more accurate results.

Facebook’s vice president of youth products – Pavni Diwanji revealed that a new version of Instagram for the teens that can be supervised by their guardians or parents is under the development process. After this new version, the implementation of the privacy policy on the original platform could be pretty much improved, as the kids would start using the kid’s version of the application.