Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announced Tuesday that the social media platform will use PG-13 movie ratings as its own standard for limiting content viewed by its teenage users.
“Now, like in a PG-13 movie, where you might actually occasionally hear a swear word, you will occasionally come across content that might be risky because we either missed it or it was said by a friend, but generally there is a lot more restrictions on what you can see,” Mosseri said on NBC News’s TODAY.
Meta anticipates the new setting will “hide even more potentially inappropriate content in the updated default 13+ content setting” than the default teen account setting did, according to a press release. Teen accounts were unveiled over a year ago, about five months after the platform began blurring nudity for teenage users.
Mosseri explained that content that is “promoting alcohol or tobacco” or “overly risky stunts” will be blocked under the default feature announced Tuesday. As a result, Instagram will prevent teenage users from seeing this content even when accounts that they’re following display it. This feature will be fully rolled out to all teen accounts by the end of the year.
TODAY co-host Craig Melvin asked Mosseri about the time teenage users spend on Instagram. Before this new feature, Instagram sent a default notification to teen accounts after an hour, suggesting that the teen turn the app off. Craig suggested that “doom scrolling,” a phrase used to describe extended use of social media, is profitable for the app.
“We do make money when people spend more time on Instagram overall, but overall if it’s bad for people to use the app, that has to be bad for business over the long run,” Mosseri said. “It would be shortsighted for us to overoptimize for something like time spent in the short-term in a way that was unhealthy because it would come back to us over the long run.”
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“I think ultimately that will be good for shareholders in the long run, and it would be shortsighted to reverse that priority,” Mosseri said.
This announcement comes a month after 37 states wrote to Mosseri demanding that location services be turned off for teenage users. On Monday, California passed a law to label social media platforms as a “profound risk of harm to the mental well-being of children and adolescents,” similar to the Surgeon General’s warning on products harmful to health.