The under-16s will need parental permission to change "Teen Accounts" settings. Photo / Getty Images
The under-16s will need parental permission to change "Teen Accounts" settings. Photo / Getty Images
Meta has expanded a series of measures to protect teens to include its New Zealand users.
The “Teen Accounts” initiative, due to be implemented today to mark Internet Safety Day, will automatically apply to under-16s, with some measures also applying to under-18s.
For under-16s, Teen Accounts can only be changed with parental permission. Meta has posted a how-to guide for parental supervision here.
The protections, which will all be applied automatically, include:
Teens accounts will be made private by default, meaning only their existing followers can see their content or contact them. New followers have to be approved. Applies to all under-16s already Instagram, and under-18s who sign up.
Restrictions on content, such as fighting and or promotion of cosmetic surgery.
Sleep mode will be turned on between 10pm and 7am, which will mute notifications and send auto-replies to DMs.
Parents can’t see the content of messages, but can see the people who their teen has messaged over the past seven days.
Parents can block a teen from accessing Instagram for a specific block of time with one click.
“We welcome default safety settings - rather than having to opt in to safety measures - and the greater and easier parental controls, which are long overdue,” Netsafe chief executive Brent Carey told the Herald.
“While we hope they will enhance online safety for young users, on their own they are not sufficient,” he added.
“There is still a role for Government to hold tech platforms to account and require preventative measures.”
Parents also had to be wary that other social media platforms had few protections for teens, he added.
Last week Netsafe and Meta traded jabs over changes to the social media giant’s content and harm policies, and changes to its teams as free-speech rules were liberalised.
How does Meta verify age?
While Meta still takes a user’s age on faith when they sign up, the social media platform says it is taking a growing series of measures to verify age after-the-fact if they’re activity raises suspicions.
“Since 2022, we’ve required teens to prove their age through a video selfie or ID check if they attempt to change their birthday from under the age of 18 to 18 or over. In addition, if a teen attempts to update their birthday from a younger age to an older age, we require them to prove their age with an ID check or video selfie,” a Meta spokeswoman said.
Meta works with a British firm called Yoti, whose systems analyse physical features and movement, and other biometric markers, to estimate a person’s age.
“Our age verification tests show that our tools are working to help keep people within age-appropriate experiences. When we began testing new age verification tools on Instagram in the US in June 2022, we were able to stop 96% of the teens who attempted to edit their birthdays from under 18 to 18 or over on Instagram from doing so.”
New steps were also being taken.
“We want to do more to proactively find accounts belonging to teens, even if the account lists an adult birthday. We’re building technology to proactively find these teens and place them in the same protections offered by Teen Account settings,” the Meta spokeswoman said.
Some of Meta's new "Teen Account" controls for Instagram, launching in NZ today.
“While we’re working diligently to ensure our AI models are accurate, we may make mistakes along the way, so we want to take a proportionate approach to the settings we apply. That’s why we’ll give people we predict to be teens the option to change these settings.”
She added, “There is an ongoing debate about the privacy trade-offs and whether parents or children want to be sharing government IDs with multiple tech companies, mostly foreign. We know that our tools and age verification with Yoti are working. Of course no technology is perfect, but if you put 50 accounts in front of someone and ask them to verify if someone is 12 or 13, it’s not easy.”
Not withstanding Meta raising the desirability of sharing a Government ID, uploading an NZ driver licence or passport is a mandatory part of its process for regaining control of a hijacked account. It was “all done through secure channels,” the spokeswoman said.
In November last year, Australia’s Parliament passed a law banning under-16s from using social media or opening a new account.
The law will come into effect in November this year.
It will be enforced by Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who is still assessing possible implementation methods.
Critics have raised free-speech concerns with the measure and questioned its practicality.
“There are really only three ways you can verify someone’s age online, and that’s through ID, through behavioral signals or through biometrics - and all have privacy implications,” Grant told NPR.
Some biometric ID providers look at facial feature to gauge age. Grant said she had met with an age assurance provider in Washington DC that used at AI-based system that looked at hand movements with a 99% success rate.
“Say you do a peace sign then a fist to the camera. It follows your hand movements. And medical research has shown based on your hand movement, it can identify your age.”
Grant noted that most of the social media platforms already have a self-imposed age limit of 13.
In NZ, outgoing Science, Innovation and Technology Minister Judith Collins said parents should be responsible for policing their children’s social media use.
This article has been updated to reflect that two Teen Account features - the ability for parents to bar access to content relating to certain topics at all times, and the ability for teens to “select topics they want to see more of in Explore and their recommendations so they can focus on the fun, positive content they love” - will not be available for the initial NZ launch.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
