Instagram has just made it more difficult for creeps to prey on teenagers who use the social platform. To keep teens safe, the service is enforcing a number of preventative strategies, the most notable of which is a cap on direct messages, or DMs.
The new measures acknowledge that teenagers face a unique collection of dangers on Instagram, and that there's only so much that teens and their parents can do to keep unprincipled people away.
According to J. Fingas, from engadget, “Adults now can’t message under-18s who don’t follow them.” The restriction works by using two: the user's stated age when signing up, as well with machine learning that predicts people's ages.
Teenagers will also get safety notifications in the DMs if an adult they've messaged has sent a lot of friend and message requests to other people under the age of 18. For me, even being 21, I’d receive messages, message requests, and group chat requests from inappropriate and creepy adults. My DMs would mention, “Hey Beautiful, what’s your cash tag and be blessed? Will you be my sugar baby? I can be your sugar daddy/sugar [mama].” -- the list goes on! Fingers crossed, if these strategies are effective enough to see some changes!
If you encounter one, you will be able to: cut the discussion short, entirely block the adult, report them or enforce restrictions. Instagram will begin to find more ways to stop creepers from engaging with teens like banning teen accounts from tips, Reels, and Explore and masking the adults' comments on public posts.
Instagram has also been promoting teenagers to use private accounts, and its Parents Guide has been revised with newer privacy and safety resources. The notices will begin to appear in some nations this month of March, and will become more widely accessible soon after. It's uncertain how well the DM and discovery limitations would operate in practice, but they might be beneficial if they prevent creeps and encourage teenagers to be more careful.
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