Meta's latest set of parental supervision tools helps monitor children and teens as we look at virtual reality.
The update allows parents to block apps and web browsers directly, see their children's screen time and friend lists, and turn off the Link and Air Link features on Quest headsets to access otherwise blocked content on the user's personal computers. The optional requirement for teens to notify their guardian and initiate parent approval for purchases are included in the supervision tools. A how to guide for the virtual reality supervision tools will be launched by the company.
Dr. Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyber wrote that parents and guardians will now have access to a suite of tools to safeguard and stay involved with their teen's participation and experiences with the growing popularity of virtual reality.
Meta is also adding teen well-being resources for users of the photo sharing website. It will be possible for parents to set specific quiet hours for their children during the day or week. After scrolling through the same content for an amount of time, the app will notify users to switch topics on the Explore Page. The alert is designed to encourage teens to discover something new and exclude topics that may be associated with appearance comparison. New "Take a Break" videos will be featured when a user has been scrolling through the reels for too long.
The new parental controls in virtual reality debut a few days after a law firm filed eight lawsuits against Meta for not adequately protecting children. Following accusations last year that its social media platforms ignored concerns about teen mental health, the company's head Adam Mosseri testified in Congress in 2021.
Users and researchers expressed concern that young users would still be exposed to unmoderated hate speech after the launch of Meta's Horizon Worlds. The voice chats of strangers in virtual reality were turned into unintelligible, friendly sounds and a personal boundary feature was added by Meta. In May, Meta announced new locking tools to block specific apps from a user's Quest headset in response to concerns that teens and children with supervision were being exposed to inappropriate virtual reality spaces.
Meta has tried before to make its apps and tech safer for young people. In March, Meta launched the Family Center forInstagram, which houses the app's teen safety and parental monitoring tools. Educational resources about online safety for families were included in the center. With the recent addition of the ability to filter out sensitive content from your feed, it's easier than ever to keep up with what's happening in your world.
Tools like these are more important than ever in the virtual reality world of Metaquest. In a space where adults can't escape harassment, we need to ask how companies can address the damage done.
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