Meta Platforms Inc.-owned Instagram today announced some profound changes to how the platform works for young people in an effort to address the growing concern that social media is damaging the minds of children.

The company said it is ushering in “built-in protections” for young folks, giving parents more control over how their kids use the platform. New “teen accounts” will become available starting today, but so far only in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia.

For the the people who’ve been trying to encourage such changes, the issue isn’t always that Instagram or other social media is intrinsically bad, but that kids spend too much time in this highly competitive world. The changes today mean that parents will now have the ability to limit how much time their children spend on the app, and if they so choose, they can block their kids from using it.

No doubt one of the new features children will hate is the one that allows parents to see all the private messages their children are sending on Instagram, while they’ll also be privy to the content categories their kids have been looking at. The accounts will also be set to private, while there will be strict control on what kinds of content will become available for the young user. These conditions apply to kids under 16. Older teens will be able to turn these features off.

“This [change] really tries to very meaningfully shift the balance in favor of parents by basically putting teens into the strictest default settings over what content they see, who they can be connected with, what time they can spend … and crucially, if you’re under 16, they’ll have to ask mum and dad if they can change those settings,” said Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs.

The pressure on social media companies to do something about young people’s overuse of their products has been immense. There have been recent calls to put health warnings in such apps in what’s been called a “national emergency” in the U.S. Even so, Antigone Davis, Meta’s director of global safety, said the idea for teen accounts was not a result of government legislation or proposals but a decision made after hearing the stories of parents.

“Parents everywhere are thinking about these issues,” she said. “The technology at this point is pretty much ubiquitous, and parents are thinking about it. From the perspective of youth safety, it really does make the most sense to be thinking about these kinds of things globally and addressing parents’ concerns globally.”

This might be PR-speak, of course. Meta and before it Facebook have at times been accused of putting profits before safety, but there’s little doubt the new changes will go a long way to ameliorate the company’s detractors.

Photo: Freepik