While many teens have been captivated by other more current social platforms, especially TikTok, Instagram continues to remain in force among young Internet users.
Being a social network, Instagram places children and adolescents at greater risk when considering the various threats commonly associated with social networks, including cyberbullying, stalkers, scams, inappropriate content and other types of digital violence.
That’s why a leading proactive threat detection company shared some keys to keep teenagers safe on social networks and thus take care of their privacy.
The first step is undoubtedly setting up account privacy. Instagram offers two options: public or private account. In fact, as part of recent measures targeting its younger users and their parents or guardians, Instagram automatically assigns private accounts to those under 16 when they sign up for the sitealthough they can still choose to change it and make it public.
“It’s also worth having a talk with your kids about the risks of having a public-facing profile: It might not be wise to let anyone see everything you have on your feed, the stories you’ve shared, and so on, as this can provide enough material for malicious characters to carry out their nefarious strategies“comments Martina López, Computer Security Researcher at ESET Latin America.
Also, those who have their public accounts are free to switch to a private account at any time, but it is worth mentioning that this action will continue to keep the followers they already had.
Instagram prevents adults from sending direct messages to those under 18unless they follow those adults. Another safety feature the platform recently launched to protect young users is sharing safety prompts or prompts to encourage vigilance in teens in conversations with adults they are already following.
Comments, tags, and mentions are some other ways users can interact with each other, including minors. In general terms, it is wise to make sure that no random strangers can tag or mention minors in their postsand further curb what may be inappropriate interactions with them.
It is important to note that Instagram announced a few weeks ago that “It would disable people’s ability to tag or mention teens who don’t follow them.”
If you want to hide offensive comments, you can activate Instagram’s comment filtering system. In addition, a personalized word list can be configured, where to include terms that are considered personally offensive.
Besides, Instagram also recently launched several features that are designed to curb cyberbullying..
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