San Francisco: A year ago, Instagram made sweeping changes to the account settings of its teenage users after growing scrutiny from parents and lawmakers over child safety issues.
On Tuesday, it took them a step further.
Instagram, which is owned by Meta, said it would begin limiting the content its teenage users can see, based on the PG-13 ratings system used by the film industry. The policy, which will roll out by the end of the year, will also apply to conversations with the company's artificial intelligence chatbots, which lawmakers are investigating for having inappropriate sexual chats with children.
By choosing the PG-13 standard, Instagram aims to make its new policy familiar to parents, said Max Eulenstein, the app's head of product management. PG-13 movies are generally allowed to have some swear words, mild violence and partial nudity, although Meta said it would not recommend content with nudity to teen users.
"Our North Star in the teen experience is parents and what they're telling us they want for their teens, and that's what led to this development and why we focused on the PG-13 standard," Eulenstein said in an interview.
Meta, which also owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger, has long contended with concerns over how its apps affect children and has promised to protect minors from inappropriate content since 2008. Mark Zuckerberg, the company's CEO, has been grilled by lawmakers over child safety issues. Meta faces personal injury lawsuits in state and federal court that accuse it of harming young people with an addicting product.
Instagram has hundreds of millions of teenage users, and the changes are its most significant update to teen content moderation since last year's policy overhaul, Eulenstein said. As part of those initial changes, the accounts of people under 18 were made private by default, which meant that only followers specifically approved by an account holder could see their posts.
Last year's safety changes limited what material teenagers could be shown in their feeds. The changes announced Tuesday will make it harder for teenagers to actively seek adult content and restrict them from interacting with certain accounts altogether. The app will also introduce a setting called "Limited Content" that parents can impose and is stricter than the PG-13 rating system.
The changes are one of Meta's first major safety updates directed at AI chatbots, which are facing scrutiny for conversations that have harmed some users. On Instagram, the company has "AI characters," which are chatbots with fictional personalities that users can message as they would other human accounts. Meta said these chatbots would "not give age-inappropriate responses" that would be out of place in a PG-13 movie.
A movie is rated PG-13 after a panel of parents vote on whether it is appropriate for children based on Motion Picture Association guidelines. For its new policy, Instagram followed a similar process, creating panels with thousands of parents to rate material on the app that they deemed PG-13 appropriate. It will also use its latest AI to rate and moderate content, Eulenstein said.