Instagram gets tools to protect teens from bad influence

Instagram is getting tools to protect teens from the platform’s ill effects on teens. For example, parents will have the optional option to watch and the company will encourage teenagers who watch the same content over and over to consume different content.

Facebook CEO Nick Clegg announced the upcoming changes to US TV shows NBC Meet The Press and CNN State of the Union, Deadline reports. The change to Instagram’s algorithm is that it will recognize when teens watch content that is potentially harmful to mental health and then come up with different content.

It is still unknown how exactly parental controls will work. Both tools are not yet available and Facebook has not tested with them yet. It is unknown when they will be released. The tools are a response to the commotion in recent weeks, when an internal investigation by Facebook itself showed that Instagram is harmful to some teens.

Changes are also coming to Facebook itself. That feed will show more posts from friends in the future and less about politics, Clegg says. It is still unknown what the impact of this will be. The last time Facebook did that, it also hit online journalism. As a result, many media reached fewer people via the platform.

The harmfulness of Facebook and Instagram is part of political debate in the United States. Last week, a whistleblower came forward who exposed much of the internal investigation the company has commissioned. The 37-year-old data analyst Frances Haugen has now been in the US Congress for a hearing. In addition, politicians promised to do something about the harmful influence of Facebook’s algorithms.