KUALA LUMPUR: Children under the age of 16 will no longer be allowed to create social media accounts by themselves from July – but that will not be all.
There will be more conditions by Meta to protect teens using their services online.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, said that since 2024, all accounts registered as being at the age of 13 to 17 are automatically classified as teen accounts.
These accounts are automatically locked to private status and require parental approval to be changed, said Meta Asia-Pacific Products public policy director Philip Chua (pic).
Teen account users will receive a notification prompting them to close the app once they reach one hour of daily use. Notifications will also be automatically muted between 10pm and 7am.
“For those registered as being between 13 and 15, changing to a public account requires parental permission.
“Those registered as aged 16 to 17 can keep their current privacy settings or be set to private by default,” he told a press briefing here yesterday.
Teen accounts also cannot receive message requests from people they do not follow or are not connected with.
Chua said teen account users will also see additional context about accounts they deal with. These include safety tips, the month and year the account they are talking to joined the platform in an effort to help teens identify suspicious accounts or scams.
Teen account users also cannot go live nor can they view broadcasts that have been flagged as not being age-appropriate.
Chua said content displayed to teen accounts are also automatically filtered by their platforms’ algorithm to be more age appropriate.
“Certain words, terms and content deemed not appropriate will not be displayed,” he added.
To get parental permission for any account privacy changes, the parents of teen account users must have their own social media accounts be registered as the parent account.
Parent accounts will have access to the parental control hub, allowing them to modify default limits, enforce blocking restrictions as well as directly manage usage time and access for teen accounts.
On teens who try to create adult accounts, Chua said other users can report accounts they believe are underage or teens to have them reviewed.
“Meta has channels to review these reports and change them into teen accounts.
“We also have content reviewers who are trained to remove accounts that appear to be owned by children under 13.
“Our artificial intelligence programme will also be able to identify likely-teen accounts,” he added.
