Instagram on Thursday rolled out its own version of ‘Do not disturb’ with a new feature called ‘quiet mode’ for users in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Although available to all users, Meta introduced it particularly for teens to take a break from the endless scrolling and focus on studies, especially at night.
The company added that it will alert teens spending too much time on the app at night.
Once enabled, the feature will pause all notifications, auto-reply to messages and update your activity status to ‘in quiet mode’. When turned off, the user will receive a summary of all the action they missed out on. Meta intends to help people “set boundaries with friends and followers” with this rollout. Meta aims to bring it to more countries in the future.
Instagram also introduced other tools to personalise recommendations as well as more parental controls. Users can now tag posts that show up on the ‘Explore’ tab as ‘not interested’ to avoid seeing such content in future and also block words, emojis and hashtag recommendations. Parents can be alerted when their ward changes a setting and also see blocked accounts on their child’s handle.
The amount of screen time of teenagers has increased by 17% from 2019 to 2021, according to a survey by Common Sense Media. The latest Data.ai report has found Instagram to be the most used social media app by Gen Z. Amidst criticism over social media’s harmful effects on young adults, the ‘quiet mode’ is the latest in a series of attempts by Meta to give users more control over their digital footprints.
Recently, Instagram introduced ‘nudges’, which alerts teenagers spending too much time on a particular topic – especially comparing appearances – to change content, parental supervision tools to set time limits for kids, and recommendations of non-social media related activities for users to take a break from the app.
Instagram has also announced several safety tools to protect minors’ privacy, access to adult content and advertising.
