Instagram is introducing new policies limiting interactions between teenagers and adults to make its platform safer for young users. The app has banned adults from direct messaging teenagers who don\u2019t follow them and is introducing \u201csafety prompts\u201d that will be shown to teens when they DM adults who have been \u201cexhibiting potentially suspicious behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Safety prompts will give teenage users the option to report or block adults who are messaging them. The prompts will remind young users not to feel pressured to respond to messages and to \u201cbe careful sharing photos, videos, or information with someone you don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Notices will appear when Instagram\u2019s moderation systems spot suspicious behavior from adult users. The company is not sharing detail on how these systems operate but says such suspicious behavior could include sending \u201ca large amount of friend or message requests to people under 18.\u201d The Facebook-owned Instagram says this feature will be available in some countries this month (it did not specify which) and available globally \u201csoon.\u201d
Instagram also says it\u2019s developing new \u201cartificial intelligence and machine learning technology\u201d to try and detect someone\u2019s age when they sign up for an account. Officially, the app requires that users are aged 13 and above, but it\u2019s easy to lie about one\u2019s age. The company said it wants to do \u201cmore to stop this from happening\u201d but did not go into any detail about how new machine learning systems might help with this problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New teenage users who sign up to Instagram will also now be encouraged to make their profile private. If they choose to create a public account anyway, Instagram will send them a notification later \u201chighlighting the benefits of a private account and reminding them to check their settings.\u201d
The Verge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Instagram is introducing new policies limiting interactions between teenagers and adults to make its platform safer for young users. The app has banned adults from direct messaging teenagers who don\u2019t follow them and is introducing \u201csafety prompts\u201d that will be shown to teens when they DM adults who have been \u201cexhibiting potentially suspicious behavior.\u201d Safety prompts will …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32110,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-news","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32109"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32112,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32109\/revisions\/32112"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}