As part of its effort to raise awareness of the importance of rest and sleep among teenagers, the Instagram platform announced a new feature called Night alerts. This step comes as part of the platform’s ongoing initiatives to improve the experience of using the application, especially among young people.
Nightly alerts work smartly to monitor continued app usage, inviting younger users to close the app and go to sleep if they spend more than ten minutes scrolling through Reels or direct messages.
These alerts will appear automatically without having to activate them manually, and teens will not be able to turn them off.
Instagram has not yet determined whether the new feature will be activated for all teens or only for those under eighteen.
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The announcement came about a feature Night alerts In the wake of new policies that Meta implemented last week to protect teens on Instagram and Facebook, which comes on the heels of a major lawsuit filed against Meta and other platforms like TikTok and YouTube over child safety concerns.
This is not the first time that meta platforms have sparked controversy. In 2021, more than 250 international academics signed an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressing their concern about the company’s internal research into the potential harms to teens from using its platforms.
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This was followed by Instagram launching new tools and features, including updated privacy rules, eligibility tools, and a “Take a Break” feature. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, stressed at the time the importance of users feeling satisfied with the time they spend on the social network.
