Last year, Instagram faced backlash for allegedly exposing teenagers to explicit content and unwanted contact by adults. This prompted Meta, the social media giant, to implement sweeping changes and introduce new account features for its teenage users. On Tuesday, Instagram announced another significant change to its policies, including restrictions on conversations between teenage users and Meta’s AI Chatbots.
Max Eulenstein, Instagram’s head of product management, told the New York Times that Instagram would adopt the PG-13 rating system for films, in line with Motion Picture Association guidelines. The move is meant to make it more difficult for teenagers to seek out or be exposed to explicit content.
The new tools will also prevent teenagers from interacting with certain accounts altogether and introduce a new setting called “Limited Content,” which parents can control and is stricter than the PG-13 rating system. Instagram will also use its latest AI to rate and moderate content.
The New Policy Targets Meta’s Own AI Chatbots
The changes are among Meta’s first major safety updates to its A.I. chatbots. On Instagram, “A.I. characters”—chatbots with fictional personalities that users can message as they would other human accounts —have become commonplace.
Senator Josh Hawley (R) called for an investigation into these chatbots in August, following a Reuters report that alleged Meta’s A.I. bots had “sensual” and “romantic” conversations with children.
Under the new policies, Meta said these chatbots would “not give age-inappropriate responses” and would engage only in conversations that meet the PG-13 standard.
Tuesday’s announcement is the latest in a long line of safety updates and changes that Meta, which also owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger, has promised since 2008. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and chief executive, has previously testified at Government hearings over the company’s approach to child safety issues.
To develop its new policy, Instagram created panels of thousands of parents to rate app content they deemed PG-13, Eulenstein said.
Meta Says PG-13 Is The Standard
The PG-13 standard, used for films like the recent Fantastic Four: First Steps and Superman, rates movies as “Parents Strongly Cautioned” because some material or scenes may be inappropriate for children under 13. The material or scenes in question may contain intense violence, strong language, some nudity, or thematic elements that are not suitable for younger viewers. While the ratings system is a guide for parents, theatres are not legally required to enforce age restrictions on PG-13 movies.
Using the PG-13 standard, Instagram aims to make its new policy familiar to parents, said Eulenstein. “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,” Meta said. Instagram would also not recommend content with nudity to teen users.
Instagram’s teenage user base is in the hundreds of millions, and the implementation of the PG-13 standard is the most significant change to teen content moderation since last year’s policy overhaul, which some have said has been insufficient to date. In those policies, the accounts of people under 18 were set to private by default and limited the material that teenagers could see in their feeds.
