Meta's has been listening to some concerns after all especially now after some pressure.
These changes very well could help parents moderate their teens. Meta's head of product says these changes address particular 3 concerns in an Npr interview.
Will this be the end of the complaints and concerns geared towards Instagram, probably not.
I'm personally on the fence about this type of stuff. On one hand, yes I 100% agree about actually keeping kids safer online (not like the politicians "Think of the kids!" type of "safety"). On the other I don't want anyone to have to give up privacy by having to confirm their age by sending some form of verification, whether that picture/video of ID with birth date on it or having an AI that will inevitably get so many false positives judge you, just to access a service online.
I'm 100% in the second camp. Facebook having my ID is a much bigger issue than having my kids' profile be public. I as a parent can ensure my kids' profiles are acceptable, or mark them as private myself. I can't ensure Facebook deletes my ID after verifying my identity.
Yes, kids should be safer online, and that starts at home. Educate parents and kids about how to stay safe, that's as far as it should go.
I'm also in the second camp. Plus, censoring the bad words on specific users is a few too many steps closer to don't say gay on the internet. Is ass ok but not fuck? Is sex talk forbidden? All mention of anatomy, including general questions about health? How about they ban anti-capitalist language too? The tiktok language phenomenon shows that users will absolutely just make do getting around communication bans, "unalive" and "le$beans" being the most popular. This type of censorship has already happened on other platforms, and it's all bullshit and useless.
I completely agree. I'm reading a book related to 1984, and all of the thought crime and whatnot it talks about is scarily on-point when it comes to social media censorship. For example, "sex crime" is strictly controlled, and in the same chapter that someone gets taken away for getting pregnant, the MC talks about sexual relationships she has and plans to have. Nobody can talk about love or relationships, yet everyone seems to engage in them, or at least one-night stands. In fact, the word used for "abortion" in that book is "unbirth," which is right there with the term "unalived."
Blocking out a huge part of human culture doesn't help anyone, and it doesn't actually work, because people will find a way. What can work is giving users the tools to hide stuff they don't want to see.