- Meta plans to roll out new parental controls around teens’ access to AI character chat on Instagram
- Parents will also have limited insight into what topics their teens are discussing with chatbots.
- The changes follow public outcry over leaked documents showing bots making romantic and inappropriate comments to children.
Meta announced that parents will be able to restrict and block their teens from chatting with their AI characters on Instagram from next year. The tech giant promised new monitoring tools that give guardians more visibility and control over the kinds of chatbot interactions their children can access.
So while teens will still be able to use Meta’s general AI assistant, private chats with individual AI personalities, including those designed by other users, can be disabled in whole or in part by their parents.
Meta’s announcement follows complaints and regulatory investigations, sparked in part by a leak of internal documents suggesting the company’s AI systems had engaged in “overly intimate” conversations with children or allegedly offered incorrect medical advice and failed to filter out hate speech. These upcoming parental controls are likely part of Meta’s signal that it is seriously trying to contain and contain the problem.
With the new controls, parents will not only be able to block access to specific AI characters, but will also get an overview of the topics their teens are discussing with chatbots. Full conversation logs won’t be available, but the idea is to give parents enough context to spot potential trends or topics. Of course, this assumes that the tools work as intended and that teenagers don’t find clever ways around them.
The general Meta AI assistant will remain available, presumably for homework help, factual questions, and basic support tasks. Meta is apparently betting that this middle ground, which limits RPG-like character chats while maintaining access to a more usability-focused assistant, will satisfy both anxious parents and product managers who want the feature to stick around.
Secure chats
Chatbots no longer simply answer questions; they are personal interlocutors to whom, for better or for worse, people become emotionally attached. Meta wants to draw the risk of engaging with such AI chatbots out into the open, or at least give parents a flashlight to see what’s going on.
The ability to monitor conversation topics without reading every message is an attempt to balance teen privacy with parental oversight. It’s a fine line, but one that reflects how quickly AI has changed the nature of online conversation, especially for younger users.
For the average family, the changes may provide some relief, but they also serve as a reminder. Your child’s phone is no longer just a window to content. It’s a portal to interactive “characters” that they may treat as more real than they should.
But it will take vigilance on the part of parents and developers to keep such interactions safe, and Meta and its fellow developers will face plenty of backlash if they fail to do so.
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