A new feature designed to help people focus, and to encourage people to set boundaries with friends and followers while on Instagram was launched yesterday.
Known as the ‘Quiet mode’, once enabled, users won’t receive any notifications, profile’s activity status will change to ‘In quiet mode’ and it would automatically send an auto-reply when someone DMs the user.
Announcing the new features in a statement, Meta, owners of the micro-blog site said that “Teens have told us that they sometimes want to take time for themselves and might be looking for more ways to focus at night, while studying, and during school. You can easily customize your ‘Quiet mode’ hours to fit your schedule 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. Anyone can use ‘Quiet mode’, but we’ll prompt teens to do so when they spend a specific amount of time on Instagram late at night.”
According to Meta, the ‘Quiet mode’ will be available to everyone in the US, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand today (Thursday January 19), but will be in more countries soon.
Meta explained that it want to give people more control over the content they see on Instagram, “so we’re introducing new features that allow people to tell us what content they don’t want recommended to them.”
“First, you can now choose to hide multiple pieces of content in Explore that you aren’t interested in at one time. Additionally, when you select “Not interested” on a post seen in Explore, we’ll aim to avoid showing you this kind of content going forward in other places where we make recommendations, like Reels, Search and more.
“Next, while you can already hide comments and DMs containing specific words, we’re now expanding this feature to apply to recommended posts you might see across Instagram. Add a word or list of words, emojis or hashtags that you want to avoid – like “fitness” or “recipes” – and we’ll work to no longer recommend content with those words in the caption or the hashtag. You can access this in the Hidden Words section of Privacy settings”, Meta stated.
In addition to providing teens with more ways to manage their time and experiences on Instagram, Meta promised to help parents be more aware of the choices their teens make, and make it easier for them to have discussions with their teens about their settings through Family Center and supervision tools.
“Recently, we added the ability for parents to see their teen’s Instagram settings, including privacy and account settings. If their teen updates a setting, parents will receive a notification so they can talk to their teen about the change. Parents can now also view accounts their teen has blocked” the company noted.
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