Instagram today announced the new security measures that are implemented on its platform to help better protect those under 18 years of age. In this regard, the platform has focused on establishing barriers for adults when dealing with them rather than changing the default privacy settings for teenage users, as TikTok did earlier this year.
From the outset, and in general, adults will be unable to contact adolescents who are not their followers, receiving a message that it will not be possible. The exception will be found in interactions with adults in the family and established trusted adults.
But if a teenager is already interacting with an adult who is outside the exceptions, Instagram will notify him in case he may have suspicious behavior, so that the adolescent can act through some of the functions that will be put at his disposal. layout.
Instagram will also make it more difficult for adults to find profiles of teenagers in the different sections of the application, and they will not even appear within the list of suggested users.
Note that Instagram allows its service to be used by users from the age of 14 onwards, seeking to protect in its new security update all those who are under 18 years of age.
An AI will soon discover also who is lying about her age
On the other hand, the platform points out that it is currently developing a system based on automatic learning that allows detecting adolescents who may be lying to the application about their real age, although it will be a matter of seeing its effectiveness in practice, being interesting to know those variables that will take into account to perform the detection in users.
And like Google, on Instagram they also work on guides and educational material aimed at parents and adolescents themselves so that they can be aware of what a safe handling of the application should be applied to the age levels of adolescents.
Little by little, the important technology firms are adding capabilities that make it possible to protect children and adolescents on popular platforms, where they may be exposed to abuse by other users, leading to initiatives in the safe use of the platforms themselves.
Instagram is no stranger to this situation, used mostly by a young audience, so it chooses to bring new security mechanisms that help as much as possible so that everyone can participate safely.
Surely the initiatives will not stop here, since there will be those who can devise new ways to abuse the rest, in addition to the fact that Instagram is a constantly growing platform, so it will always have to adapt to new forms of abuse that may arise from it. road.
Image Credit: Instagram
