Meta recently has been facing a lot of wrath from all across America as they have been hit with multiple lawsuits by parents who claim that their apps have a negative influence on their kids. For this, they even had to monetarily compensate some individuals who said that they got mental stress due to the platform.
In the middle of all this, Meta announced yesterday, its new set of parental supervision tools for Instagram and Quest VR headsets. These tools will give parents additional supervision controls. Parents or guardians can send invitations to their teens to initiate these supervision tools. Meta is currently just expanding on the parental supervision features they previously worked on and released in March.
Parents will now be able to accept or reject purchases, block apps, view all the apps that their teenager owns, and receive notifications about any new transactions. This will be possible as they will have the access to the software that’s controlling Meta’s Quest VR Headset. Parental control also gives you the ability to monitor how much time your kid is spending on these apps. They will also have the access to see who the child has added as a friend and can block content for their children from a PC, directly to the VR headset.
These helpful tools are currently available in the USA and will soon be rolled out for Ireland, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and, the UK. Meta aims to come out with the update globally by the end of this year. Additionally, parents and guardians are given a feature called ‘nudge’. And it does what it means, helps the parents in giving their teens little digital ‘nudges’ to take a break from social media. The ‘nudge’ can even help the teen discover something new on Instagram if it sees them consuming the same type of content or something that it doesn’t want the kids to see.
Meta has not even been spared by politicians recently, as it is in deep waters right now due to the lawsuits. Meta aims to discredit the leaked information by one of its former employees by releasing these new safety measures. Instagram now allows parents to set a time limit on their kid’s weekly usage of the app, and the nudge feature will also help curb the kid’s time if they watch too many reels. Last year in a similar effort, Meta had come out with the “Take a Break” feature to remind users in between to take a break from Instagram.
The company also stated how they are going to come up with a new “Parent education hub” that will hold the parent’s hand through all the supervision tools. Meta also notes how this is just a starting point and together with the parents, they will continue to make the platform a better place.