Physician: Instagram limiting content for teenagers is a step in the right direction

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Instagram’s plans to limit content visible to teenagers users is “the absolute least that social media companies can and should do” to help teens develop a healthy relationship with social technologies, says University at Buffalo physician Sourav Sengupta.

The new policy, announced today, will employ the film industry’s PG-13 rating system as a guide. It also will also include dialogs with artificial intelligence chatbots from Meta (the owner of Instagram), which are under investigation by federal lawmakers for having improper sexual chats with children.

Instagram is also introducing a new “Limited Content” setting — stricter than a PG-13 rating — that parents can enable to further control what their teens see. The updates aim to make it more difficult for teenagers to search for adult content and will block them from interacting with certain accounts entirely.

Sengupta, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB, is an expert in child and adolescent mental health.

He believes this is a proper step in helping teens develop healthy relationships with social media, and that additional steps are needed to protect teens from harmful content. Below, Sengupta shares some thoughts on Instagram’s announcement. 

What is your reaction to Instagram’s announcement to limit content to teens?

This is certainly a step in the right direction. As a society, we are still grappling with how best to supervise our youth's engagement with social media. Relying solely on parents to do this has been challenging to date. Social media companies taking on some of the responsibility of a shared social compact to protect our teens is welcome. We can all agree that the kinds of content that will be filtered out should not be information that our teens have unfettered, unsupervised access to.

How will teens benefit from viewing limited social media content?

Our teens' brains are being flooded by an amount of social information that is frankly overwhelming. Any step that helps to "gate" some of the information they have to navigate is a positive one. This may be a helpful step in creating a stepped or phased introduction to social technologies in the lives of our youth. This likely also needs to be combined with other efforts to monitor time spent on social technology devices and ongoing efforts to maintain and promote authentic "IRL" (in real life) social engagement.

Should all social media channels go in this direction (limiting content that is not age-appropriate)?

To be honest, this is the absolute least that social media companies can and should do. They should be commended for doing so and then encouraged to move on to the next many steps we need to take as a society to keep our youth connected, safe and healthy.

What else can be done?

All this being said, this is only one step in what needs to be many steps to help our teens develop a healthy relationship with social technologies. We also need to educate them about the perils of excessive social technology use, the challenges of constant comparison with their peers' curated lives, and the impact on our attention spans that extensive social media use can contribute to.