Instagram has introduced new updates for people, especially teens, to manage their time and experiences on the platform.
The launch of Quiet Mode in Australia will help people focus and set healthy boundaries. Quiet Mode encourages people to set healthy boundaries with their friends and followers, letting them know when they’re unavailable for a certain period, like at night time.
When someone enables Quiet Mode, they will see an “In Quiet Mode” status on their profile, and Quiet Mode will mute notifications and send an auto-reply in response to DMs from friends and followers.
Instagram said that teens told them that they feel like they need to be available a lot of the time. With that in mind, the platform will proactively prompt teens to turn on Quiet Mode when they spend a certain amount of time on Instagram at night.
Adam Mosseri, head of instagram, told Instagram users in a video: “What Quiet Mode allows you to do is pick times of the day or the week where you don’t want to be bothered by Instagram. No notifications. Maybe it’s time for homework, or maybe it’s during your commute, or maybe you just want to have a break on the weekend.”
“This allows you to put Instagram into Quiet Mode. We won’t send you any notifications. If someone DMs you, they’ll know that you’re in Quiet Mode and that you’re not going to receive that notification. Then when you come out of quiet mode will batch everything that you missed and deliver it to you so you don’t miss anything,” he added.
Instagram is also making it easier for people to see more of the content they’re interested in and less of what they want to avoid by bringing Hidden Words to recommendations.
Mosseri said: “Hidden Words already exist in DMs and in comments and allows you to block any DMs with comments with the select set of words that you can pick. Now what we’re doing is we’re extending Hidden Words to also support recommendations.
“So, you can pick a set of words and not have us recommend any photo or video where we see those words in the caption and recommendations in Feed and Explore and anywhere else we might see recommendations on Instagram,” he added.
Mosseri also noted that Instagram is making Not Interested even more powerful by adding multi-select.
“If you don’t know already, you can long-press any photo or video in explorer, and you can say not interested. And we’ll do our best not to show you any photos or videos that are similar in the future,” he said.
“What this allows you to do is just like a bunch of photos and videos at once. We’ve all been there when all of a sudden Explorer got a little tipsy and went really after one new thing that it thinks you’re interested in; it’s not quite right. This allows you to quickly and easily clean that up.”
Instagram is also updating parental controls to make it even easier for parents to manage their teen’s experience on Instagram.
Parents will now be able to view their teen’s Instagram account settings, including privacy and content defaults and controls. They will also receive a notification if their teen updates a setting or any accounts their teen has chosen to block, to help parents and teens chat about these changes together about these changes.
These new features complement the platforms existing tools that already help people manage their time and the content they see on Instagram.
These include Take a Break, which helps remind people to take some time away from scrolling, Sensitive Content Controls that let users decide how much sensitive content they’d like to see presented in their feed, and nudges that encourage teens to switch to a different topic if they’re repeatedly looking at the same type of content on Explore.
‘Quiet mode’ will be available to everyone in Australia and New Zealand, the US, United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada from today, and more countries soon.