New ways to manage time on Instagram

Supporting wellbeing and safety online is one of the platforms top priorities, Meta owned Instagram has announced.

With the new year and that ‘back to school’ feeling, there is a lot of discussion about how it can set healthier boundaries, Instagram said.

This includes the amount of time spent on social media and how users can connect more meaningfully with the people and ideas they care most about.

With this in mind, Instagram has introduced new ways for people, especially teens, to manage their time and experiences on Instagram, including a “Quiet Mode” to help people focus and set healthy boundaries.

The updates include:

• We’re launching Quiet Mode to encourage people to set healthy boundaries with their friends and followers, letting them know when they’re unavailable for a certain period, like at nighttime.

• When someone enables Quiet Mode, they will see an “in quiet mode” status on their profile and Quiet Mode will mute notifications and send an auto-reply in response to DMs from friends and followers.

• Teens tell us they feel like they need to be available a lot of the time, so we will proactively prompt teens to turn on Quiet Mode when they spend a certain amount of time on Instagram at night.

• We’re making it easier for people to see more of the content they’re interested in and less of what they want to avoid. People can now hide multiple pieces of content in “Explore” at once, right from the Explore page, without needing to click into each post individually. We’ve also updated our Hidden Words tool – which previously protected people from seeing scammy DM requests and comments – so that users can hide recommended posts with certain words, emojis, or hashtags in the caption.

• We are updating our parental controls, to make it even easier for parents to manage their teen’s experience on Instagram. Parents will now be able to view their teen’s Instagram account settings, including privacy and content defaults and controls.

• They will also receive a notification if their teen updates a setting or any accounts their teen has chosen to block, to help parents and teens chat about these changes together about these changes.

New features

The new features reflect the social media platform’s ongoing work to build things that are meaningful for young people, and that are really helpful and useful for creators, Instagram said.

“These new features complement our existing tools that already help people manage their time and the content they see on Instagram.

“These include Take a Break, which helps remind people to take some time away from scrolling, Sensitive Content Controls that let users decide how much sensitive content they’d like to see presented in their feed, and nudges that encourage teens to switch to a different topic if they’re repeatedly looking at the same type of content on Explore,” it said.

Compiled by Faizel Patel, Senior Digital Journalist

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