Namibia to get Instagram for teens in January
Stricter security measures await
Namibian parents will get more hands-on when Instagram's new 'teen accounts' launches locally in January.
Although Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, announced on Tuesday evening that it will switch minors to 'teen accounts' on Instagram, this feature will only apply to Namibian users from January.According to the company's director for communications in Africa, the Middle East and Turkey, Kezia Anim-Addo, Meta does not have the necessary information to predict how many users in Namibia will be affected by this.
With a teen account, minors will automatically be placed under stricter security measures in Instagram. Teenagers under the age of 16 will have to get permission from a parent or guardian to change their security measures.
Youngsters will automatically be switched to private Instagram accounts, which means that they cannot simply be followed, but will first receive a follow request that they must accept before the follower can see the content they post on Instagram.
Teens will also be placed under the strictest direct messaging measures and can only receive messages from people they follow or are already connected with. They can further only be tagged by people who follow the them on social media, while no sensitive content will be shown on their timelines.
Meanwhile, the social network will send teens a notification every day after they've been on the app for 60 minutes, urging them to log off and notifying them that it will turn off notifications overnight and send automatic replies to direct messages.
Parental involvement
With the switch, parents and guardians will be able to see who their children have sent direct messages to in the past seven days, but they will not be able to see the content of the messages. Parents can also limit a daily time limit for Instagram and block their child from the app for certain times of the day. Teenagers can send requests to their parents to relax these measures.
To ensure that teenagers do not simply give an incorrect date of birth to Instagram to bypass all these changes, they will be required to upload their ID. These are stored on Instagram's server for 30 days and will then be deleted. In addition, teenagers will have to choose one of two methods to verify their age: Social vouching or a video of themselves.
With social vouching, Teen Instagram will ask users who are over 18 years old and meet certain security measures to confirm that they are over 18. Using a video, an artificial intelligence programme, Yoti, will analyse their faces to estimate their age. Yoti can reportedly identify teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 with 99.3% accuracy and doesn't keep the video. - [email protected]