Written by
Mackenzie TaylorPosted 9 months ago
Last year, Instagram announced a new feature that would help “nudge” teens and young adults away from harmful content. Well, a whole year later and they finally have started rolling out the feature in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand!
How does the new nudge feature work?
Say you’re scrolling on Instagram’s Explore page and looking at posts that have a particular theme over and over and over again. Instagram will then send you a notification that suggests you start looking at other types of posts instead.
According to Instagram, the feature “is designed to encourage teens to discover something new and excludes certain topics that may be associated with appearance comparison.”
Teens will receive a notification that prompts them to “choose what to explore next” with lots of different types of posts to look at instead. Once they click another post, it will allow the user to filter through a different group of content that isn’t related to the original topic the user was looking at previously.
Does the nudge feature work for all content or just harmful content?
The notification will show up after scrolling on any topic for a particularly long time. However, what is suggested in the recommendations will never show anything with an appearance comparison.
What other ways is Instagram trying to protect teens and children?
Another way that Instagram is trying to protect the mental health of teens is by bringing its Take a Break feature to Reels. If a teen is scrolling through Reels for too long (hello, all of us?!), a reminder will pop up that suggests they might want to take a moment to spend some time outside of the app in their hand.
Instagram is also making adjustments to its parental controls. As of yesterday, they will allow parents to send invites to their kids to gain access to parental supervision tools—something teens were only able to access and initiate previously.
This access will allow parents to see what types of posts or accounts their child reports, as well as gain control over the time their teen spends on the app.
After the criticism that the app has received over the years for having a severe impact on mental health in teens, especially teen girls, it’s good to see some action taking place to combat that. But is it enough? Will it make teens want to accept their parental permissions or will they create a finsta for parents and hide their real account? Only time will tell.
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