Instagram releases new parental supervisory tools: What to know

Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Howley discusses Instagram's new parental controls and how to activate it, in his latest installment of 'Tech Support.'

Video Transcript

- Well, it may take a discerning eye for Instagram users to weed out scams, the platform now has at least launched a way for parents in the US to supervise their teenagers' screen time. Yahoo Finance's own tech editor, Dan Howley, has the breakdown. And Dan, Instagram has been criticized before over the mental health effects it's had on young users, particularly teenage girls. How does this latest move take a step towards addressing that?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, this obviously, has been a long time coming, if you've been following anything with Meta and the criticisms that they faced from the likes of Congress, as well as parent groups. And really, what this is, is a new suite of parental supervision tools that will allow parents to be able to see essentially who their kids are following, who follows them, and then limit their ability to use the app for hours at a time.

And really, you know, as you pointed out, the issues stem from some of the documents that were leaked by whistleblower, Frances Haugen, late last year showing that Instagram had a negative impact on the mental health of teen girls, specifically especially around body image issues. And so they're releasing these new parental supervisory tools. Again, they're not necessarily full controls, but supervisory.

And the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, basically said that there's going to be more to come. They also by the way, announced some parental controls for their VR platform that will be coming as well. But let's jump into the Instagram capabilities here, and just to give you a rundown of if you're watching what you need to do to allow for your kid to let you supervise their account. And that's a big caveat here. You have to have your kid allow you to do this.

So as far as the to-dos, the first thing you have to do is have your child sign on to their account on their own device. Then you're going to have to sign on to your account on your device. Chances are if they use Instagram, if you use Instagram, that stuff's knocked out right away. By the way, I should also point out that they need to be at least 13 years of age to use Instagram. If they're younger than that, then you have to delete their account.

Once you're both signed in, you have to ask your child to go to the supervision option. And that's going to be in the main settings menu. And then request you as a supervisor. So it's not necessarily something that you can do on your own. Your child has to be on board with this as well.

Once they send you that notification to your device, you can accept it, and then your two accounts will be linked. And from there, you can start using these tools. And you know, I set up my own fake account for a child that I made up, a 14-year-old named, Bert Howitzer, which passing that to my wife is a potential name for a future child.

But really, know what I was able to do was limit the amount of time that this account was able to stay on Instagram, anywhere from 15 minutes to you know, a few hours. And after I said it for 15 minutes and started scrolling on that fake account, it sent me a notification saying your time's up. That's it for today. Come back tomorrow, essentially.

Now, they also do allow you to see who they are following, and who's following them. The problem there is you can't as the parent make them unfollow anyone. So if you find an account that you find suspicious, or something that you just don't want your kid to be following when they're 13-years-old, or have them follow a 13-year-old, you can't necessarily do anything about it. You have to take it to your kid and say, look, I don't want you following this person. I don't want them following you. Block them, or report them, or something along those lines.

So it seems something that Instagram probably should have put in, especially if they're trying to prevent the kind of abuses that we've actually heard about on Instagram, where they tried to reach out to children. Just as another anecdote as far as ages go, according to a survey by Thorn, which is a group that seeks to protect children from exploitation through technology, anywhere between 40% of 9 to 12-year-olds are actually already on Instagram. So if your kid has a smartphone, chances are they may have been on there.

So if again, they're below the age of 13, ensure that they delete their account. If they're between 13 and 17, set up these features. And then once they turn 18, the features lapse, because at that point, they're an adult. So they can basically do whatever they want.