Instagram will start nudging teens away from content they continuously browse through

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The platform says it is finally rolling out the feature in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The platform will show a notification if a teen is spending too long on the Explore page looking at posts with a specific theme.

The feature is designed to encourage teens to discover something new and excludes topics related to appearance comparison. Users will get a notification that will prompt them to choose what to explore next with a variety of posts they can choose from instead. Users will be able to scroll through a different stream of content if they tap into a post.

Image: Instagram

According to an external study, more than half of respondents agreed that nudging made their social media experience better by helping them become more aware of their time on- platform. Over the course of a week, one in five users switched to another topic when they received a nudging.

We want to make people feel good about their time on the photo sharing site. Adam Mosseri, the head ofInstagram, said in an interview that this is a way to encourage that. If you are going particularly deep, we suggest some other topics.

Starting today, parents will have more power to supervise and limit their teens’ time on Instagram and Meta VR headsets.



Instagram head @mosseri says "parents know what's best for their children" — and breaks down some of the updates coming to the app. pic.twitter.com/FVZJ127Oay

— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) June 14, 2022

No matter what topic they are scrolling through, users will get nudgings. After scrolling for a number of posts, the notification will show up. Content that may be related to appearance comparison is not included in the recommendations of what to switch to.

The Take a Break feature is intended to encourage teens to spend more time outside of social media. If a teen has been scrolling through reels for a while, the platform will remind them to take a break. The feature is currently being tested in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Some changes to its parental controls are being made. For the first time, parents will be able to send invites to their kids to gain access to parental supervision tools on the platform. Information on what types of posts or accounts their child reports, as well as gain more control over the time their teen spends on the photo sharing site, can be seen by parents.

The "Facebook Papers" are a set of leaked documents that have come to be known as the "instagram Papers." According to leaked internal research, Facebook is aware of the negative impact it has on young users who scroll through images of people with "ideal" bodies. Some teens said that their anxiety and body image issues were worsened by their use of the photo sharing app.