New social media features and updates to know this week
Updates to Instagram, Snap and more.
It’s a busy week for social media updates – especially where 16- and 17-year-olds are concerned. Both Instagram and Snap rolled out significant changes for this small but powerful demographic, designed to balance freedom with safety. Snap and YouTube also both recently held major summits, resulting in tons of new updates.
Let’s get into it.
Instagram made waves when it announced a new slate of safety measures aimed at protecting teens on the platform. The move comes after widespread criticism and congressional hearings into the app’s failure to create safe spaces for minors.
- Accounts for kids under 16 are set to private automatically for both existing and new accounts, though parents can opt out. New accounts for teens 16-17 will be set to private by default, though existing accounts will not. A private account means teens must accept friend requests before their content is visible to those people.
- Teens can only message with people they are connected to. They can also only be tagged in posts by people they’re connected to.
- Teens will be opted into the tightest sensitive content restrictions.
- Teens will have the most stringent filters in place, including an anti-bullying feature.
- Reminders of how much time they’ve used on the app.
- Automatic opt-in to sleep mode, which mutes notifications overnight.
Parents can adjust the settings for kids under 16. Those over 16 will generally have the ability to opt in or out of these features themselves, but parents can implement parental restrictions if desired. Parents using the supervision feature can also see who their teens are chatting with, set time limits, block them from using Instagram during certain time periods and view what topics they’ve chosen to view.
On a much lighter note, Instagram has also added a number of new stickers and a game called “Emoji Pong.”
Meta
Meta has introduced a number of new ad formats across both Instagram and Facebook ahead of the upcoming holiday season. These include options for highlighting promo codes, new options for notification ads, the ability to add multiple links to a single image or video ad on a Facebook page, hyping nearby in-store shopping opportunities, travel retargeting options and more.
YouTube
There’s tons of news from YouTube as the platform recently held its Made on YouTube event, rolling out plenty of new creator features.
YouTube is building on group spaces with its new Community feature. While these groups are linked to a creator’s page, they are described as “fan initiated,” though creators can dictate who can post. The Community tool seems to be an attempt to keep creators from building Discords off-platform to support their fans, by allowing deeper two-way engagement directly on YouTube.
In a move that seems to echo TikTok’s Duets feature, creators can now add prompts to Shorts, which viewers can respond to with their own videos.
YouTube will also expand its auto-dubbing feature. This AI-driven ability will now allow more creators to automatically dub their content from English into Spanish, Portuguese or the new additions, French and Italian.
A new feature that’s sure to cause controversy is ads placed on pause screens. YouTube says this will be a “less interruptive” experience, though customers will be the judge. Hulu and AT&T already have pause ads.
Bluesky
X challenger Bluesky has implemented a number of new trust and safety features to cut down on spam and harassment. They’ve put in place new protocols to see when a single user creates new accounts, which are often used for nefarious purposes. Now, users who block a list’s creator will be removed from any lists they’ve made. It’s a small but important step for the growing platform.
Snap
Similarly to Instagram, Snap is tinkering with its offerings for older teens. Teens, 16-17, will be able to share some content publicly. While people who follow the teen can reply to their story, these replies will be subject to strict filters. Direct messaging from these replies will not be possible. Their posts will be shown only to Snapchatters who already have mutual friends with the teen to keep distribution low. Teens will not be able to see metrics to avoid peer pressure.
Snap also just held its Partner Summit, which means new updates, including new AR lenses and updates on Spectacles.
TikTok
In a move that’s sure to make social media managers everywhere happy, TikTok has introduced a feature that allows you to delete a video and re-edit it with one push of a button. Finally, an easy way to fix that typo.
X
In a quality-of-life improvement, X is testing a feature that allows you to block people from your DMs without blocking them from your whole account.
Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.
