Meta’s New Safety Feature Ensures Teen Protection from Online Predators on Instagram and Facebook by Restricting DMs to Followers Only

To protect teens from unwanted contact and make it easier for parents to shape their teens’ online experiences, Meta on Thursday announced “stricter privacy settings for teens” on Instagram and Facebook.

Under this new regulation, the tech giant has now restricted adults over 19 from messaging teenagers who don’t follow them, and limited the type and number of direct messages people can send to people who don’t follow them. one text message.

“Today, we’re announcing an additional step to help protect teens from unwanted contact by removing their ability to receive DMs from anyone they don’t follow or connect with on Instagram — including other teens — by default,” Meta said. .

With this new default setting, teens can only message or add to group chats with people they already follow or connect with.

Teens on supervised accounts must get their parents’ permission to change this setting, the company said.

This default setting applies to all teenagers under the age of 16 (or under 18 in some countries).

These new changes to teen defaults also apply to Messenger, where under-16s (or under-18s in some countries) can only receive messages from Facebook friends or people they’re connected to through phone contacts.

Additionally, the tech giant plans to roll out a new feature designed to protect teens from seeing unwanted and potentially inappropriate images in their messages from people they’re already connected to, and prevent them from sending such images themselves.

“We’ll have more to say about this feature, which also works in encrypted chats, later this year,” Meta said.

To help parents shape their teens’ online experience, Meta now allows parents to approve or decline requests from teens (under 16) to change their default security and privacy settings to less strict settings – instead of just notifying them of the change.

“Giving parents the option to accept or decline requests to change teens’ default safety and privacy settings gives parents the tools they need to protect teens while respecting teens’ privacy and ability to communicate with friends and family.” Larry Magid, CEO of ConnectSafely, said in a statement.

For example, if a teen using surveillance tries to change their account from private to public, change their sensitive content management from “Less” to “Normal” or – now – try changing their DM settings to hear from people they’re not. Already following or connected, their parents will receive a notification prompting them to accept or decline the request, the company explained.