Instagram Limits for Teens

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Today I read from [Techcrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/30/instagram-adds-a-teen-protection-tool-to-limit-interaction-to-close-friends/) and [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/30/24167259/instagram-limit-posts-everyone-but-close-friends) that there are new tools to limit things so that people can only get comments from friends and family. The irony isn’t lost on me.

The irony I’m thinking about is that we have built a social media landscape where the content from strangers floods our timelines without us wanting to see it. Rather than just give us chronological timelines with posts from our friends, they add mitigation factors for slowing down and stopping harrasment.

Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Twitter all have that problem. They push the crap created by people we don’t follow into our feeds, and we get frustrated, and sometimes we cease to be as empathetic as we should be. Usually if I see content that makes me react negatively I try to find a way to block that content. My other solution, of course, is just to dump the network.

I dumped FB for four or five years, until Twitter was bought and destroyed by Musk and I stopped using Instagram when it was bought and destroyed by Facebook. I believe that a core source of trolling is bad algorithms. Algorithms, rather than encourage friendships and close social ties encourage viral behaviour. We’re meant to love, hate, and more, instead of having friendly sustained conversations that encourage us to meet each other in person.

“From there, you can toggle on limits for Accounts that aren’t following you, Recent followers, or Everyone but your Close Friends.”

The issue, in my eyes, is that we can limit who sees our posts, but we can’t limit what we see. I don’t want to see content by binfluencers, as I call them. I want to see content by friends, family, and accounts I follow.

## What Makes Sense to Me

When I saw the headlines I expected that there was a mode, within instagram that created a private network, a forum for friends of friends to share photos and chat. That is what makes sense to me. A micro-network within a network. A group of friends of friends.

Instagram say that they have resolved the bullying issue but they’re missing the reason people are bullied. If content gets too many likes, and too many shares, it is forced onto everyone and this results in negative responses. Blocking comments, without blocking whether we can see a post, does not make people safer. People will find other ways to troll and flame content creators.

## And Finally

In the early days of social media we had networks of friends of friends. If people were nasty or cruel with each other they would be held to account and kicked out with speed. Now the web is no longer a network of friends so the cohesive glue that kept people civil is gone.

Imagine, today you can create an FB account, and within seconds it will be flooded by the algorithms. In theory you don’t need to follow anyone, and it’s pointless to follow anyone, because the algorithms make our friends invisible.

Recently I was in an FB group but I left because I found that the posts, and comments were toxic. People would troll and be trolled daily. It’s for this reason that I quit the group.

If social networks allowed everyone to follow their friends, colleagues, and family there would be no, or very little trolling because people would be held to account. In a network of strangers trolling thrives, because no one is accountable to others. It goes back to my post about young people and feature phones.

Now that social networks are owned and controlled by tech giants they have no humane value. The measures taken by Instagram give the illusion of a positive change but the toxic environment has not been tidied up.