Meta, the owner of Instagram, is launching new parental controls in the UK for the platform on 14 June.
You can set daily time limits between 15 minutes to 2 hours. After that, a black screen will appear on the app.
Parents can also schedule breaks and view any accounts that their child has reported, as well as the reasons why.
The tech giant also launched a parent dashboard for all Quest virtual reality headsets around the world.
The supervision tools can now be activated by parents. Previously, they could only have been initiated by the youth.
These new VR controls allow parents to approve purchases, block apps and view the friends of their children.
A “nudge” feature on Instagram is also being tested. This encourages teens to search for new subjects if they keep searching for the exact same thing repeatedly.
In March, the Instagram tools were launched in the US.
Instagram is for 13-year-olds and older. Meta claims that Oculus VR content was also created for teens. However, younger children can use both platforms.
In response to backlash, Instagram decided to suspend plans for an Instagram platform that was accessible to children under 13 years old in 2021.
The Wall Street Journal also reported last year that Meta, which controls Facebook and WhatsApp aswell as Instagram, had done some research that found teens blame Instagram for their increased anxiety and depression. However, they kept the results secret.
Instagram claimed that the story was based on a “limited set of findings” which cast the company in a “negative light.”
Molly Russell, 14, committed suicide in 2017 after she saw self-harming and suicide content on the platform.
The coroner discovered that she had used her Instagram account 120 times per day for the past six months during a pre-inquest review held in February 2021.
Instagram stated in a statement that it does not permit content that glorifies suicide or self-harm and will remove such content.
