Instagram Has New Features To Protect Users Under 18 Years Old

Maintaining privacy is one of Instagram's priorities. (photo: Solen Feyissa / Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Social media platform giant Instagram has announced several new features to protect its teenage users under the age of 18.

These measures include restricting adult accounts that Instagram deems suspicious from accessing children's accounts. The company also sets new teen users to private, not public accounts, and limits how advertisers can target users under 18.

"We want young people to enjoy using Instagram while ensuring we have strong privacy and security features to protect them. That's why we're rolling out this new update for our global community today, and we'll continue to develop tools that protect teens and our entire community", said the head of policy for Facebook Australia, Josh Machin, quoted by 9News, Wednesday 28 July.

"Privacy is one of our top priorities, and we will continue to listen to young people, their parents, lawmakers, and industry experts to build tools and experiences that protect everyone on our platform".

The bulk of the changes include using computer algorithms to look for potentially suspicious behavior on the platform. Using this technology, Instagram can deem certain accounts suspicious and restrict those account holders from seeing children's accounts in search and on Reel, and not being able to see comments from teens on other people's posts.

In addition, suspicious account holders will not be able to follow juvenile accounts they find by searching for usernames or leaving comments on their posts.

However, Instagram didn't say exactly how an account was deemed suspicious. Finally, advertisers worldwide will now be limited to a user's age, gender, and location only in terms of ad targeting.

Previously, advertisers might have access to other app activities or web activity to target ads. It's still far from something that can be called a safe platform, but Instagram's move is a clear sign that the Facebook-owned social media takes the safety of its teenage users seriously.