The Meta group unveils a list of measures supposed to better protect teenagers who use its Facebook and Instagram platforms. Among them, the default assignment of more protective settings for privacy.
Knowing that its youngest users are particularly exposed to contacts that could pose a danger to their safety, the Meta group announced measures last year to protect adolescents from potentially suspicious interactions and adults. Mark Zuckerberg’s group wants to take it a step further by testing new solutions to protect these same young people from messages from adults with whom they are not connected.
Making it easier for teens to report suspicious accounts
How does Meta do it? Suspicious contacts will now simply be removed from the list of “You may know” recommendations, the famous suggestions found on Instagram and Facebook. The group is also testing in parallel the removal of the “Write” button on the Instagram accounts of teenagers when they are visited by adults deemed suspicious.
One of Meta’s plans for its young users is to encourage them to make greater use of the protection tools available to them. Thus, the American group has developed certain features that allow them to let their application know that they feel uncomfortable while browsing. As such, it has just introduced new notifications to encourage them to use these tools.
These good intentions should lead to easier reporting of accounts, once they have been blocked. In this sense, Meta has seen an increase of more than 70% in reports sent by underage users in the first quarter of 2022, both on Messenger and from Instagram messaging. ” We send young users notifications with information on how to handle inappropriate messages from adults “says the company.
The arrival of more protective default settings to strengthen the safety of young people who land on Facebook
Meta took the opportunity to announce the arrival of new default privacy settings for teenagers on Facebook. Concretely, since this Monday, November 21, any new user under the age of 16 (or under 18, depending on the country) who registers somewhere in the world on the thumbs-up social network will be assigned by default more protective privacy settings.
But newcomers are not the only ones affected. Meta also plans to encourage young people already registered on Facebook to use these same settings, probably through a notification. Facebook is following in the footsteps of Instagram, which had set up default settings last year for this same audience.
Finally, Meta leads a fight against the dissemination of intimate images of adolescents, in collaboration with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), an American non-profit organization that has been protecting missing or exploited children for several decades. Together, the two entities aim to create a global platform for teens who would fear seeing intimate images they have created being shared on public online platforms without their consent.
Source : Meta
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