• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

As Meta faces increased regulatory pressures across the globe, including a $1.4 trillion lawsuit filed by four U.S. states, the tech giant is announcing parental supervision tools for Threads despite allegations that they could have little impact on teens’ social-media use.

According to Meta’s announcement, Threads’ first wave of parental-supervision tools are designed to allow guardians to view their teen’s time spent on the app, set daily time limits, adjust the sleep mode, and manage privacy settings via Meta’s cross-platform Family Center.

As for content, parents and guardians can manage the tagging feature, controlling which accounts can and cannot tag their teen in posts, while also managing the approving sensitive content preferences.  

The tools, which officially launch in the U.S. next week, will only apply to users under 16 years old.

Parents and guardians will be able to decide whether their teens can change the settings on their own or not.

While parental-supervision controls exist across Meta’s social-media app ecosystem, it is possible that this form of regulation has little impact on teens’ social media habits. 

In February, an internal study conducted by Meta and the University of Chicago was mentioned in a social-media addiction trial. The study found that “parental and household factors have little association with teens’ reported levels of attentiveness to their social media use.”

“There is no association between either parental reports or teen reports of parental supervision, and teens’ survey measures of attentiveness or capability,” the study added.  

Furthermore, in the European Commission’s preliminary investigation of Instagram and Facebook, which the regulatory group found violated the Digital Services Act due to addictive design features, Meta’s parental control measures were deemed a failure. 

Time-management features targeting teens on both social media apps can be “easily dismissed,” the Commission argued, adding that the company’s parental controls “are only effective if parents and guardians possess adequate technical expertise” and put in the time to enforce them.

In the three years since its launch, Threads -- a platform designed to rival X, the app formerly known as Twitter -- has amassed around 500 million monthly users.