Instagram: Teen accounts now also in Germany
The Meta Group is now bringing the protection functions and parental control options for minors' Instagram accounts to Europe.
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As announced, Instagram is now bringing its user accounts for teenagers to Germany and other European countries. This automatically gives parents and other guardians more control over the Instagram activities of young people.
To open an Instagram account, you must be at least 13 years old. For the platform, "teenagers" are all users between the ages of 13 and 17. Stricter rules apply for 13 to 15-year-olds than for 16 and 17-year-olds.
Under 16s only with parents
Accounts for 13 to 15-year-olds are automatically set to "private" and are subject to parental supervision. This means that only direct contacts can see the content and interact with the children. Offensive comments or messages are suppressed in the app. Instagram also tries to keep age-inappropriate content out of teenagers' feeds.
The accounts go into sleep mode at night from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., which mutes notifications, automatically replies to messages and reminds the account holder that it is now bedtime. The teenager is also reminded to close Instagram after 60 minutes of use per day.
Parental control functions for the accounts were already available on a voluntary basis. With the new teen accounts, they will be expanded and set up automatically for young users and their legal guardians.
Parents or other legal guardians can use them to limit how long their children can use Instagram each day, for example. Parents and guardians can also see who their teenagers are posting with, but without knowing the content. They also control the various security settings of the accounts and can approve or reject changes requested by the teenagers.
Automatic changeover
With the introduction of Teen Accounts, existing accounts of teens under the age of 16 will be converted to private, even if they previously had a public account. They will need permission from a parent or guardian to make their account public again. Existing accounts for 16 and 17-year-olds will remain public, if they were previously public.
New accounts for users under the age of 18 will automatically be set to private. Teens under the age of 16 will need permission from a parent or guardian to switch to a public account. Teens between the ages of 16 and 17 can set their account as public themselves, provided it is not supervised by a parent.
Meta also uses artificial intelligence to identify accounts of teenagers who have falsified their age. If the software concludes that a user must be younger than 18, their account is automatically turned into a teenage account, regardless of the date of birth specified during registration.
(vbr)
