Meta Expands Safety Features for Teenagers

The changes, after Meta’s legal losses in two child safety cases, are aimed at limiting harmful content shown to teenagers on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.

Meta unveiled new safety features on Tuesday to limit harmful content shown to teenagers on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, its first major policy change since the company was found liable in March for harming a young woman with the design of its platforms.

The features will limit how frequently teenagers are shown posts about topics like nutrition, weight lifting and anxiety in their feeds, Meta said, expanding on a broader teen safety effort it announced in October.

That kind of content “can be helpful, but it should be balanced with other types of content rather than shown repeatedly,” Meta said in a statement. “That’s why we’re testing ways to limit teens from seeing too many posts of this kind in one go.”

In October, Meta introduced a rating system for content on Instagram modeled after movie rating criteria; that system is now expanding to teenagers on Facebook and Messenger. Hundreds of millions of teenagers use Meta’s apps, which also include WhatsApp, each day.

- Author: Eli Tan, The New York Times

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