Instagram Update Offers Increased Control Over Feed Content

Instagram has launched a new set of features that helps you manage what you see in your feed and silence notifications. With these new tools, you can control the content you see in your feed, and decide when and how you want to be notified.

Instagram is making changes to its platform that will allow users to hide posts containing certain keywords, in response to concerns raised by policymakers about the platform’s impact on teens. This comes after former Meta employee Frances Haugen shared internal documents that shed light on the issue.

Instagram has announced new settings that include Quiet mode, which allows users to set a customized schedule to silence notifications and auto-respond to direct messages (DMs). The app will automatically prompt teens to enable quiet mode when they spend a “specific amount of time” browsing the app at night.

Instagram is introducing new parental controls that will give parents more insight into their children’s activity on the platform. The new controls will allow parents to see what their children are posting and who they are interacting with. Additionally, parents will be able to set limits on how much time their children can spend on Instagram each day.

Instagram is expanding its filtering options to allow users to filter out posts with specific words in their captions and hashtags. This will allow users to tailor their feeds on a more granular level than before.

In 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that internal research at Facebook had found significant harmful effects of its products on a relatively small portion of teen users. The source of the documents shared with the Journal was later revealed to be Facebook employee Sophie Haugen.

According to researchers, 32% of teen girls said that Instagram made them feel worse when they felt bad about their bodies. Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users said that Instagram was a contributing factor.

At the time, Instagram's head of public policy wrote in a blog post that though the article highlighted "a limited set of findings," the company stands by the research, which they said shows "mixed" findings on whether social media is good or bad for users. Instagram promised it was working on ways to minimize harmful effects, including by "addressing negative social comparison and negative body image."

In 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta as part of a campaign to improve its image with a focus on virtual reality and the metaverse.

Lawmakers in Congress and at the state level have increased their focus on how to protect kids’ well-being online by imposing new requirements on platforms. Although there have yet to be changes codified at the national level, California recently enacted its Age-Appropriate Design Code, which requires platforms to consider how their services could pose a danger to minors and forces them to turn on the strictest privacy settings by default. The state is currently facing a lawsuit from tech industry group NetChoice, which argues the law infringes on First Amendment rights and could potentially harm minors by limiting their access to important resources.

Quiet mode will initially be available in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This feature will allow users to mute all notifications for a set period of time, so they can focus on what's important to them.