Days before Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony, Meta has introduced new child protection features on its Instagram and Facebook platforms. These features are designed to shield children from receiving unsolicited sexual advances and encountering inappropriate content.
Zuckerberg, along with executives from X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Snap, and Discord, has been summoned to discuss online child sexual exploitation with the Senate Judiciary Committee. This meeting, scheduled for January 31, follows whistleblower revelations and growing public concern about the safety of children on these platforms.
Meta announced in a blog post that it will now automatically block children from receiving messages from individuals they don’t follow or aren’t connected to, including other teenagers.
This setting, which will be the default for users under 16 (or 18 in some countries), also requires parental permission for teens with supervised accounts to change it. The post emphasized that this measure aims to ensure that teenagers and their parents feel secure knowing they won’t receive messages from unknown people in their Direct Messages (DMs).
The company has also highlighted its existing safeguards, such as preventing adults over 19 from messaging teenagers who don’t follow them and limiting users from sending more than one text-only message to people not following them. These steps come in the wake of an announcement in October about a lawsuit filed by 42 state attorneys general against Meta, alleging that its products harm children.
Following this, Meta had already set children and teenage users to the strictest content settings by default. Meta’s blog post further mentioned the development of a new feature to protect teenagers from seeing and sharing inappropriate images, even in encrypted chats. However, the company did not provide extensive details about this feature, stating that more information would be disclosed later in the year.
This move by Meta demonstrates an effort to address growing concerns about the safety and well-being of younger users on its platforms.
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