Meta Expands Teen Safety Features to Threads, Giving Parents More Control Over Screen Time

Meta said it will expand the teen safety management and supervision features it already applies to Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger to Threads. Meta announced the move at the "Screen Smart" roundtable on the 10th. The rollout will apply to Threads, the text-based SNS, starting next week.

As a result, default protection settings will be applied to teen accounts on Threads. Teen accounts cover users ages 14 to under 19, and the default settings include limits on who they can contact, who they can interact with, age-appropriate content displays, and screen-time limit notifications.

Parents will be able to manage how much time their children spend on the app. They will also be able to manage nighttime usage, as well as privacy and content-related settings.

Kim Byung-joo?

On Threads, Meta has added supervision features that let parents manage their child’s screen time, sleep mode, tag settings, and approval for key settings. Parents can register supervision on a Threads account and check and set their child’s daily app usage time in Family Center. They can also manage sleep mode from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. and control the range of posts their child can be tagged in. Parental approval rights also apply to key privacy and content settings.

Meta is also continuing to strengthen teen safety features on Instagram. Content exposure standards for teen accounts follow the film rating standard for 13 and older. For parents who want stricter settings, a "Restricted Content" mode has been introduced. In August, if a child repeatedly searches for harmful terms such as suicide or self-harm, parents using supervision features will receive alerts and expert resources. That feature will be rolled out worldwide, including in Korea.

At the roundtable, participants said that along with these features, it is necessary to check not only screen time but also the purpose of social media use and its impact on daily life. Bang Jong-im, CEO of Education Waiting TV, said it is necessary to guarantee autonomy and choice in daily life in order to guide children’s online use. Park Il-jun, president of the Digital Literacy Association, said it is important to form a relationship in which children can tell their parents about the difficulties they face online.

Lee Ji-yeon, a counseling psychology professor at the Graduate School of Education at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, said that when evaluating adolescents’ social media use, it is necessary to look not only at usage time but also at the purpose of use, its impact on daily life such as conversations during sleep or meals, and whether they can stop when they want to. She also said parents need to understand their children’s context and difficulties in using it. She added that it is important to build a mentoring relationship that helps children regulate their own online activity.

Aligned with that sense of the issue, Meta and the Digital Literacy Association will run an online education campaign to raise awareness of and usage of teen safety features. The campaign will use Meta’s major platforms and the association’s official channels. It will explain how to use the default protections and supervision features for teen accounts.

Heo Wook, vice president of external policy at Meta Korea, said the purpose of the event is to find a direction for families, platforms, and society to move forward together for the safe digital experiences of teenagers. He added that Meta plans to continue putting teen safety first and to work consistently with various stakeholders.

Source: IT DAILY · Kim Byeong-ju
Original: https://www.itdaily.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=241533

References

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