Online Safety: Instagram
Age restriction: 13.
This is Instagram’s minimum age.
Instagram is a picture and video sharing app. Users can post content and use hashtags to share experiences, thoughts or memories with an online community. You can follow your friends, family, celebrities and even companies on Instagram. Instagram allows live streaming.
What do I need to know about Instagram?
Instagram profile’s are automatically set to public, meaning that anybody can view your/your child’s profile unless settings are changed to ‘private’. When a profile is private, only approved users can view content.
Instagram allows live streaming with real-time messaging and comments. Comments are not automatically filtered.
Users can upload their own photos and choose to add filters and make adjustments to their photos, such as brightness/ contrast. To make their content more ‘searchable’, users can include hashtags in their uploads to make them easier to find.
Instagram is rolling out in-app payments for products and services directly through the app. It will operate under the same rules as Facebook Payments, which state if you
are under the age of 18, you can only use
Facebook Payments with the involvement of
a parent or guardian.
👉What do children and young people like about it?
The main things that children and young people say that they like about Instagram are:
•A fun way to see what your friends, family and celebrities are up to.
•It’s easy to communicate with your friends
•You can follow pages with things you’re interested in
•Posting photos and videos in a creative way
👉Tips
REMOVE PAYMENT METHODS
If you are happy for your child to have a card associated with their Instagram account, we suggest adding a PIN which needs to be entered before making a payment; this will also help prevent unauthorized purchases. This can be
added in the payment settings tab.
RESTRICT MESSAGES
If your child’s account is not private, anybody can message them and reply to their stories. If they do wish to keep their account public, we strongly recommend changing the
message reply settings to restrict who can message them.
TURN OFF SHARING
Even though this feature will not stop people from taking screenshots, it will stop others being able to directly
share photos and videos from a story as a message to another user. This feature can be turned off in the
settings. We also recommend turning off the feature which automaticallyshares photos and videos from a story
to a Facebook account.
FILTER INAPROPRIATE COMMENTS
Instagram announced on 1st May that they now have an ‘anti-bullying’ filter on the app. The new filter hides comments containing attacks on a person’s appearance or character,as well as threats to a person’s wellbeing
or health. The filter will also alert Instagram to repeated problems so they can take action on the user if necessary. This is an automatic filter, but it can be turned off. Make sure this is turned on in the apps settings.