Meta on 18th June formally launched the revamped safety features for minors on its social media platforms and held the Screen Smart digital literacy program to help educate the public on these features.

Meta Asia Pacific head of safety policy Malina Enlund explained that the updates are tangible, platform-level actions to the Philippines’ digital safety agenda during a launch event in Makati.

“The project is in response to the increasing demand from families, educators and policy makers for actionable methods to ensure the safety of young people online,” Enlund said.

The safety features include an updated Instagram Teen Account, which restricts the type of content that children (13 years or older) will be able to view and interact with.

Existing protections in Teen Accounts stay in place and are enabled automatically for 13- to 17-year-olds, while parents will have the option to make the protections stricter if the teen is under 16 and wants to make settings changes to be less strict,” she said.

For instance, teens will have to follow others before their content can be viewed, and only messages from people they follow will be accepted, while they can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow.

Additionally, parents will be able to limit the app usage for the day and the new “sleep mode” will silence all notifications throughout the night and reply automatically to direct messages.

By building protections into our platforms by default, “Meta is taking a proactive stance to teen safety and providing Filipino parents with peace of mind that their teen is interacting with age-appropriate content from the start of their time online.”

The event was attended by a number of government officials and private sector representatives, such as the Undersecretary for the Welfare of Children, Henry Aguda, of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT); Angelo Tapales of the Council for the Welfare of Children; Ysrael Diloy, child protection specialist from the Stairway Foundation; and Jeff Ortega, Chair of the National Youth Commission.

The Screen Smart digital literacy program is designed to bring together stakeholders for a discussion on online safety for youth, and is intended as a follow-up and complement to the DICT’s Digital Bayanihan Safety Summit.