Instagram on Thursday January 19 announced a new feature called “quiet mode,” which aims to help users in focusing and establishing boundaries with friends and followers.
The profile’s activity status changes to “In quiet mode” when the option is selected, pausing all alerts.
During this time, if a direct message is sent, Instagram will instantly reply to the sender to let them know that “quiet mode” is active.
Although all users can utilize the feature, Instagram seems to be concentrating on teenagers. Instagram encourages teens to enable the feature “when they spend a specific amount of time on Instagram late at night.” and promotes it as a tool to aid in studying.
The tool will be made available to users in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with intentions to expand to more countries in the future.
After years of scrutiny over how much time people, especially teens spend on various social media platforms and the risks it might pose to their mental health, the tool is the latest example of Instagram giving users more ways to manage their usage.
“These updates are part of our ongoing work to ensure people have experiences that work for them, and that they have more control over the time they spend online and the types of content they see,” the company said in a blog post.
In support of this, the platform is also rolling out features that will allow users more control over what appears in their Explore feed.
Instagram is also improving its parental control features. Parents may be notified when their teen changes a setting so they can chat to their teen about the change. Parents can access accounts that their teens have blocked as well.
Executives from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat faced challenging questions from lawmakers during a series of congressional hearings in 2021 regarding how their platforms could expose younger users to harmful content, harm mental health and body image (particularly among teenage girls), and lack adequate parental controls and safeguards to protect teens.
The social media companies vowed to make changes, and Instagram in particular has made many.
Since then, it has launched a parent education hub with resources, advice, and articles from user safety experts, as well as a tool that enables parents to monitor how much time their children spend on Instagram and set time limits.
Another Instagram feature encouraged users to take a break from the app, such as suggesting they take a deep breath, write something down, check a to-do list or listen to a song, after a predetermined amount of time.
The company has also stated that it is taking a “stricter approach” to the content that it suggests to kids. If they have been focusing on one sort of content for an excessive amount of time, it actively steers them toward other themes, like architecture and travel destinations.
Author-Roberta Appiah
