Meta has released a new collection of parental supervision tools through a recently announced “Family Center.”
This system will allow parents to track what their children are exposed to through Instagram and control what is visible. The Family Center was created months after Meta promised to develop better tools for allowing parents to regulate what their children see online.
“Parents and guardians know what’s best for their teens, and in December, I committed to developing new supervision tools that allow them to be more involved in their teens’ experiences,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri wrote in a Wednesday blog post. “Today, we’re making these supervision tools available in our new Family Center.”
The Family Center will allow parents and guardians to see how much time their children spend on Instagram, what accounts they follow, who has followed them, and alert parents to accounts they may have reported. The Family Center will also provide an education hub for parents to discuss social media habits with teenagers.
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“This is the first step in a longer term journey to develop intuitive supervision tools, informed by experts, teens, and parents,” Mosseri said.
The tracking tools require a teenager to enable the tracking from within the app. However, Instagram said it intends to add options so parents can initiate supervision without accessing a teenager’s app by June. Meta also said it wants to add the ability to implement time restrictions to a teenager’s access to Instagram and the ability for multiple parents to supervise an account.
The Family Center is available to all users starting on Wednesday.
Meta also announced virtual reality parental supervision tools that will allow parents to customize what sorts of content teenagers can access on an Oculus Quest VR headset. These tools will be incorporated into the Oculus Quest in the future.
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Facebook was a target of controversy in fall 2021 after former Facebook employee Frances Haugen came forward as a whistleblower about the company’s handling of political and teenager-related content. Haugen’s leaked information inspired several lawmakers to call for an investigation into whether Instagram is inherently harmful.
Several civil society groups have called on Meta to stop targeting children with ads and surveillance.
