Thursday Instagram launched “Quiet mode” to “help people focus, and to encourage people to set boundaries with friends and followers…. Once enabled, you won’t receive any notifications, your profile’s activity status will change to ‘In quiet mode’ and we’ll automatically send an auto-reply when someone DMs you…. and once the feature is turned off, we’ll show you a quick summary of notifications so you can catch up on what you missed.”
A report from the Verge notes the move “comes as Instagram faces mounting criticism over its effect on the mental health of teens, especially teenage girls.”
Since then, the company has been making a number of changes focused on the safety of its younger users, including tightening default content settings for teens, nudging teens away from content they continuously browse through, and introducing restrictions on the ways advertisers can target teens….
Instagram will specifically prompt teen users to toggle on Quiet Mode “when they spend a specific amount of time on Instagram late at night.” However, the platform doesn’t state how much time teens have to spend on the app to see the prompt and also doesn’t say what timeframe it considers “late at night.” Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw tells The Verge the notification will appear after “several minutes.”
Quiet mode launched Thursday in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand, with launches in other countries planned soon. Elsewhere the Verge reports that Meta is “putting your Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger account settings in one place.”
The company’s rolling out a new Accounts Center that lets you manage your preferences across all your Meta accounts from a centralized hub. The revamped Accounts Center will live in the settings menu on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, which means you can adjust your account settings for Facebook from Instagram — and vice versa….
Some of the settings you can toggle include personal details, passwords, security, ad preferences, and payments as well as the permissions you’ve given each app. It doesn’t seem like Meta will put all of your accounts in the Accounts Center by default, so you’ll need to add them manually.
The feature launched Thursday and will roll out gradually to all users on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram in “the coming months.”
