1. Instagram Safety Features
Meta-owned Instagram created a user-friendly, comprehensive educational hub in collaboration with leading experts, trusted organizations, parents, and young people. They executed advisory boards and workshops to get regular feedback and guidance from experts, parents, and teenagers in their commitment to build positive online experiences and better inform the development of new products, policies, and resources.
If you have an adolescent or teenager on this platform, explore the supervision tool to access the family center. You can send a request to your child’s account to initiate supervision or vice versa. Once that is established, you can:
- See the amount of time your child spends on the app by day.
- Set daily time limits or scheduled breaks to help your kid manage their time.
- See some of their settings and accounts they follow, who follows them, and your child’s blocked accounts.
- Get notifications about their activity such as when they get new followers.
Take note while this tool helps give some insight into your child’s activities, your child owns their account. Only they can delete their account or change their password. It is recommended to use this tool as a way to spark conversation and talk about the ways your child uses social media. There are plenty of helpful articles and resources to guide conversations about today’s digital world.
>Related: 7 Ways to Reduce Screen Time
2. Facebook Safety Features
Facebook is not all that popular for kids these days but your kid may still have an account to stay connected with family. Facebook also developed a safety center providing similar resources and information about ways to use this platform safely. This platform has no built-in parental controls but it is encouraged to review relevant privacy settings together with your child. This can help optimize their experience and safety online.
From inside the app, you can tap the menu button that looks like three horizontal lines found on the top right. You can find tools to limit how long your child can spend in the app but know there’s nothing stopping your kid from making changes in the future. Follow the prompts below to get there:
Menu Button > ‘Settings and Privacy’> ‘Settings’ > ‘Your Time on Facebook’
It’s also a good idea to check your child’s profile information to see what they’re sharing with the world. Check out the ‘How People Can Find and Contact You’ section to make sure your child’s account isn’t easy to find.
Review the posting process with your child. Posts are made public by default but every user has the option to limit who sees their posts. You can also limit who is able to tag or mention your child and set notifications to review tags or mentions before accepting them.
3. Snapchat Safety Features
Snapchat is very popular amongst youngsters and continues to grow as their favorite platform to communicate with each other. Kids rather snap than text and often send silly random photos or drawings to keep up with their “Snaps Ranking”. To help keep kids safe, this platform rolled out an in-app tool called Family Center to allow you to:
- See who your child is friends with on Snapchat, including new friends. This can help start conversations about who their new friends are.
- See who your child has been messaging, sending photos or videos to in the last week. But not the actual content to respect their privacy.
- Report any accounts you may be concerned about easily and confidentially.
To access the Family Center, you will need to create your own account and receive permission from your child. Take note they are able to see what you see with a mirrored view of features.
While there are limits to what you can control, Snapchat implements safety measures by requiring teens to be mutual friends before they can start chatting with each other. They also have a location-sharing tool to disclose their real-time location with a friend or family member even while the app is closed. They also have a ‘Friends Check-Up’ tool to encourage your child to review their friend lists and make changes if needed.
