I would say that We have been waiting for parental controls on Instagram for a little over three months, which is when they were announced by the company. But in that case I would be lying, because in reality it is an expectation that comes from much, much further, from when the service began to become popular among the youngest, and even more so when the more than harmful effects that it has precisely began to be revealed. among that audience, and how the company, despite knowing it, had not only not lifted a finger to fix it, but was even working on an Instagram for children.
In other words, I don’t think it’s random at all that Instagram announced it was working to bring parental controls to the service, just weeks after news broke that its director, Adam Mosseri, would have to testify before a US Senate panel. Maybe I’m being suspicious, I don’t know, but when I was a kid there was no Instagram, so one of my favorite entertainments was joining the numbered dots. I guess connecting dots is something I’ve liked since childhood.
Be that as it may, the good news is that finally, several months after announcing that they were working on it, today we can read on their blog that Instagram presents Family Center, a unified space in which parents can have some control over what their children do on Instagramas well as having access to useful information on how to act in the many different cases that may arise when using the tool.
The implementation of Instagram’s parental control measures, however, will be carried out progressively. In his debut, It will only be available in the United States at the moment., although the company’s intentions are to reach many other geographies within a period of months. And the same goes for its functions, which will be added over time.
In this first phase, parents will be able to see see how much time your teens spend on Instagram, set time limits, receive notifications when they report another user or a harmful post, and see and receive updates on which accounts they follow and which accounts follow them. With this first block, without a doubt, Instagram takes a very good step in the right direction. Now, like any first step, it must find continuity over time, with more progress in this regard.
In this regard, and as we can read on the blog, in the next update Instagram will allow parents select in which time slots they can and cannot access minors to the social network, and it will also solve an important limitation of this initial version, by allowing more than one person to supervise the activity of the minor, something that at this time, and from what we can read, is not possible.
At the moment, as I indicated before, Family Center is starting to take root. Thus, for now minors will have to start the parental supervision function of Instagram from the app for Android or iOS (at least for now it cannot be done from the Instagram web interface), and it will be from junewhen these “registrations” have already occurred in the parental control system, when parents can already start the supervision process of their children’s activities. Interestingly, and for good, this can be done from PC.
Since Instagram has the dates of birth of the users, at the moment in which the minors cease to be minors due to reaching the age of majority, your accounts will automatically leave Family Centerand parents will no longer be able to supervise or limit their activities with this system, something that also seems appropriate to me, since the moment they become adults, the platform must value their privacy.
I already mentioned it at the beginning, I think that the reasons why Instagram has stepped on the accelerator at this point are clearly related to the enormous crisis of reputation that the service experienced last year. However, that does not prevent me from acknowledging that, at this point, they are doing things right, or so it seems. We hope to see more progress in this regard, and to be able to celebrate the fact that, instead of an Instagram for children, Meta is concerned with making a healthy Instagram for everyone.
