Meta to launch Instagram accounts for teen in Hong Kong this week

Meta will launch an Instagram service for users aged under 16 in Hong Kong and the rest of the Asia-Pacific this week, with the international technology company saying the new system will require a parent or guardian to oversee their child's account.

"Starting this week, we'll begin placing teens who sign up for Instagram into teen accounts, and we'll notify teens already using Instagram about these changes so we can begin moving them into teen accounts in the coming months," the head of Instagram at Meta, Adam Mosseri, said on Tuesday morning.

The feature has already been launched in some parts of the world, including in Australia, the United States and Canada since September last year.

The new protections require a parent or guardian to be assigned as an account handler, allowing adults to oversee their child's online interactions, content consumption and time spent on the platform.

Mosseri acknowledged the ongoing challenge of age verification and admitted the platform was still seeking ways to prevent teens from falsifying their details.

"It depends on the jurisdiction. There are a number of different ways we try to verify age ... none of them are foolproof," Mosseri said.

He cited methods such as ID card uploads and face detection, while emphasizing the company's focus on collaborating with operating systems to improve verification.

Noting the common practice of teens having multiple Instagram accounts for different uses, he said the new service would continue to allow users to hold several teen accounts to explore their interests.

While he did not specify the number of teen users in the region, he said the change would affect "millions."

The new feature has drawn mixed reactions.

Clarisse Poon, a 15-year-old student at St Paul's Co-educational College, expressed concerns about the effectiveness of the parental supervision requirement.

"Most teens, knowing they will be supervised by their parents, will fake their birthdays [to start non-restricted accounts]," Poon said, adding that she herself had previously bypassed previous age restrictions.

"The teen accounts will once again prove ineffective if this loophole remains unsolved."

Dr. Adrian Low, president of the Hong Kong Association of Psychology, urged parents to use the new service with care and avoid breaching their children's trust, which could create conflict or lead youngsters to feel their privacy was being violated.

"The most important thing is to ensure good communication with your children," he said.

"First, stand in their shoes to show them you understand how they would want to spend time on these platforms, and then explain your concerns about the danger [of not being supervised]."

Parents and children should ideally explore the new feature together and jointly decide how to use it, he added.

The update will be launched this week in Hong Kong and the rest of the region, with parents or guardians required to decide what level of protections they want in place.

They will also be able to approve or deny requests from their children to change account settings, or allow them to manage their own set up.

Some safety features will also be applied automatically. For example, all existing and new accounts of users under 16 will be set to private by default.

The change means youngsters will have to approve any new followers before the latter can message them, tag or mention the user in any content.

Meta said the change was designed to limit unwanted communication from strangers and their potential risks.

Instagram will also automatically activate the most restrictive settings of its anti-bullying feature, Hidden Words, as part of the update.

The feature filters out offensive words and phrases from comments and direct message requests sent to teen accounts.

Teen accounts will have the most restrictive setting for sensitive content enabled, screening out depictions of violence or promotion of cosmetic procedures, among other topics, in sections such as explore and reels.

"This new experience is designed to better support parents and give them peace of mind knowing their teens are safe with the right protections in place," Meta said.

To help users manage their screen time, the new accounts will send notifications reminding teens to take a break after 60 minutes of daily use.

A sleep mode will also be activated, with all notifications muted between 10pm and 7am each day.

Poon felt the new feature would better protect her from explicit content and help boost her productivity by reducing screen time, but found other aspects "unnecessary and arbitrary."

"Only allowing teens to receive messages from those they've previously connected with or changing all existing Instagram teen accounts to private is quite unnecessary in my opinion," she said.

"Given that Instagram is a common tool used to connect with different people, such a setting may not be favored by teens, while its effectiveness is limited."

However, having seen many teens exposed to highly sensitive or explicit content on Instagram, Poon believed more could be done by the platform's algorithm to generate child-friendly content for teen accounts and not just rely on the sensitive content control.

She added that she disliked the sleep mode.

"If the only free time I have is at night after 10pm — the time when Instagram mutes all notifications — I will feel quite bothered by it," she said.

Read the full story at SCMP.