Social media can be addictive and dangerous alike, and teens are known to be particularly preoccupied and obsessed with social media. This brings with it a host of its own problems, such as being the victim of trolling and cyberbullying, which is why platforms have been working hard to address this issue. Now, Meta-owned Instagram is introducing several features that are designed to give users a greater degree of control over the app, one of which is a new Quiet Mode.
Once Quite Mode is enabled, users will not receive any notifications, while the activity status of their profile will change to let people know the same. And if other users send DMs, Instagram will send an automatic reply to let them know that the user is not available at that time. According to the company, this will prompt teen users to enable the feature if they’re using the app late at night. Quiet Mode can be customized to fit the schedules of users, once the feature is turned off, Instagram will provide them with a short summary of notifications in order to help them catch up on what they missed during their hiatus. So the next time you want to have some uninterrupted, peaceful time on social media – in this case, Instagram – Quiet Mode is perfect for you.
You will have to wait for a while to get your hands on the feature, though. While Quiet Mode is rolling out today, it will be available to users in a handful of countries. According to an official blog post, the new feature will be accessible to users in the US, the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. More countries will be added at a later date, though no specifics were provided.
“These updates are part of our ongoing work to ensure people have experiences that work for them, and that they have more control over the time they spend online and the types of content they see,” the company said in the blog post.
As part of its efforts to offer users with more ways to manage their time and usage of social media – to combat addiction – Instagram is also giving users more control over what will be shown to them in their Explore feed. They can now mark content with a “Not Interested” label, and Instagram will refrain from showing similar content on their feed and in other places where recommendations are made, such as Reels and Search. Furthermore, users can add words or lists of words, emojis, or hashtags that they do not wish to see on their feed, and Instagram will prevent containing those words from being recommended in the Explore feed.
The final feature to come is an update to its parental supervision tools. Parents will not be notified when a teen user updates a setting, as well as view accounts their teen has blocked.
