Instagram

Meta is offering teenagers a strengthened version of its Instagram Limits tool. When set to its highest level, only Close Friends will be able to comment, reply, tag, mention, or message them.

It’s the latest development in the company’s protections for teens, after anti-grooming blocks and nudity blurring introduced earlier in the year …

Following a brief outage that affected most of Meta’s services last week, Instagram is down again for some users. While some people can still access parts of the app, others are reporting that the platform is entirely down this Friday.

An EU investigation has been opened into growing concerns about teen Instagram addiction, to determine whether parent company Meta is breaking the law by deliberately seeking to make its apps addictive.

The investigation will also look into whether the company’s age-verification procedures are sufficiently robust, and the phenomenon of sending users down potentially harmful ‘rabbit holes’ …

A court is being asked to decide whether or not Meta has a legal obligation to allow the use of Unfollow Everything – a browser tool which effectively empties your Facebook feed.

The idea behind the tool is that instead of being sucked into an effectively endless feed of posts from every friend, group, and page you have ever followed, you get to proactively choose the posts you read …

Update: Half an hour after publishing, TikTok Comms shared much more on X, including availability in Australia and Canada starting today.

Remember that TikTok Photos app rumor? More recently, the unreleased app has been going by the name TikTok Notes. Although the name is changed, the game is still the same: take a swing at Instagram.

Instagram is rolling out a new safety feature, designed to protect teens from being exposed to unwanted nude photos in Instagram direct messages. The system will blur nude photos in Instagram DMs when the recipient is believed to be a teenager.

The safety measure is designed to protect against three problems, including the growing problem of ‘sextortion’ on the platform …

If you’re having problems accessing Meta’s Instagram and Threads apps today, you’re not alone. Both services appear to be suffering from an outage that affects your ability to post and interact with content.

Meta had confirmed earlier this year that it would let users choose to see less politics-related content on Instagram and Threads. Now the company has confirmed that this option is finally being rolled out to users on both platforms. Read on as we detail how the feature works and where to find the new toggle.

If you’ve suddenly been logged out of the Instagram and Threads apps, it’s not just you. There’s a bug affecting a number of users of Meta’s platforms on Thursday night, causing their accounts to be logged out for no reason. Read on as we share more details about the bug.

TikTok is already an Instagram competitor when it comes to videos. However, while TikTok is a video-first social network, Instagram still lets users post photos in their feed and share 24-hour Stories. Now it seems that TikTok has been working on a new app to compete with Instagram’s photo feed.

Yesterday’s global meta outage seemingly took out the company’s entire network, with users unable to access Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Threads, and Quest headsets.

The outage lasted between one and two hours for most users, and while everything now appears back to normal, questions are naturally being asked about what went wrong …

Instagram has been working on a lot of new features for its iPhone app recently. This week, users noticed another new feature coming to Instagram on iOS: a widget that opens the Story Camera right from the Lock Screen.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s AI announcement has raised major concerns, after he said that the company had more user data than was used to train ChatGPT – and would soon be using it to train its own AI systems.

The company’s plan to use Facebook and Instagram posts and comments to train a competing chatbot raises concerns about both privacy and toxicity …

The timing of Meta’s announcement of new teen safety measures earlier this week likely wasn’t coincidental: Mark Zuckerberg and other social media CEOs are set to testify to Congress on the topic.

Facebook’s founder will be joined by the chief execs of TikTok, Snap, Discord and X as Congress seeks to determine whether the companies are doing enough to protect teens from harm …

Meta is beefing up protections against grooming of teens on Instagram and Facebook by further limiting who is able to send them direct messages.

The latest measure builds on a previous Instagram protection, based on who teenagers follow in the app …

The start of a new year is a time many of us use to take stock – of our goals, our habits, the ways in which we spend our time. For me, one significant change has been adopting a more sane approach to social media, and apps in general.

I’m a huge fan of technology, of course, but I also fully acknowledge that tech also has its downsides – and social media in particular has been a very mixed blessing …

Meta has announced a radical new move to comply with European antitrust requirements taking effect in March. The company will let you unlink your Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger accounts – as well as those for Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Gaming.

This means you’ll have the option of setting each up as a completely separate account, with no shared data between them …