Somejätti Meta’s new message and content restrictions are designed to protect minor users from unwanted content sent by both adults and other young people.
Social giant Meta is limiting who can message underage users on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. Adobe Stock
In the future, both Facebook and Instagram will limit the ability of adult users to message minors. You cannot send a message to a minor user from the account of an adult user, if the users do not follow each other.
The setting will be on automatically for all minors. If you want to change the setting, you can only do so with the guardian’s approval through Facebook’s family settings.
In addition, the account settings of all users under the age of 16 will be changed so that only users they follow can send them private messages.
There are other strictures
Changes are also coming to the operation of Facebook Messenger. In the future, users under the age of 16 can only receive Messenger messages from their Facebook friends.
Meta says that it is also developing tools to protect minors from unwanted content sent by adults they know.
In the future, minor users will automatically be covered by the strictest protection. This means that Meta controls even more closely what kind of content is shown to young users.
The changes will reportedly take effect in the coming months.
Source: Meta