Instagram launches ‘silent mode’ for when users want to focus | CNN Business

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Instagram on Thursday announced a new feature called “silent mode,” which aims to help users focus and set boundaries with friends and followers.

When the option is enabled, all notifications will be paused and the profile’s activity status will change to “In silent mode”. If someone sends a direct message during this time, Instagram will automatically send an auto-reply notifying the sender that “silent mode” is on.

While the feature applies to all users, Instagram seems to be targeting teenagers. Instagram touts it as a tool to help study and asks teens to turn on the feature “when they spend a specific amount of time on Instagram at night.”

The tool will be rolled out to users in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with plans to add it to more countries in the future.

The tool is the latest example of Instagram giving users more ways to manage their usage, following years of scrutiny about the time people, and especially teenagers, spend on various social media apps and the damage it can cause to your mental health.

“These updates are part of our ongoing work to ensure people have experiences that work for them and have more control over the time they spend online and the types of content they view,” the company said in a post on blog

As part of this effort, the platform is also introducing features to give users more control over what appears in their browsing feed. For example, it is now possible to mark content with the label “Not interested” to prevent similar content from being shown in the future. Instagram is also introducing an option to prevent words or lists of words, emojis, or hashtags, such as #fitness or #recipes, from being recommended in the exploration feed.

Instagram is also updating its parental control tools. When a teen updates a setting, parents can get a notification so they can talk to their child about the change. Parents can too see the accounts your teen has blocked.

In a series of congressional hearings in 2021, executives from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat faced tough questions from lawmakers about how their platforms can lead younger users to harmful content, harm mental health and body image (especially among adolescent girls) and lacked parental controls and sufficient safeguards to protect adolescents.

Social media companies pledged to make changes, and Instagram in particular has made a lot of them. It has since introduced a parenting hub with resources, tips and articles from user safety experts, and launched a tool that lets guardians see how much time their kids spend on Instagram and set time limits .

Another Instagram feature encouraged users to take a break from the app, such as suggesting they take a deep breath, write something, check a to-do list or listen to a song, after a predetermined amount of time. The company also said it’s taking a “stricter approach” to the content it recommends to teens, actively pushing them toward different topics, such as architecture and travel destinations, if they’ve been engaged in either type for too long of content