Sylvia Musalagani: Why Online Protection is Important for Teenagers

In today’s digital age, when young people are more connected than ever, the internet offers endless opportunities for learning, creativity, and social interaction. However, it also exposes teenagers to a range of risks, from cyberbullying and online predators to misinformation and data privacy breaches. Safety policy manager, Africa, Middle East & Turkey at Meta, Sylvia Musalagani, who is a leading advocate for online safety, emphasises the introduction of Teens Account by her organisation and the importance of prioritising online child safety. Excerpts:

A civil society organisation recently expressed concern that 36 million child internet users in Nigeria are at risk and called on the National Assembly to introduce legislation to protect them and today we have Meta launching Instagram Teen Account, how do you reconcile that?

Yes, we’ve seen a lot of countries coming up with regulations to make it safer for children to participate in the online environment, which is a great thing. It’s something that we welcome at Meta and a lot of these regulations put in place different requirements for online platforms to adhere to that would make it safer for children’s experiences online. But with that said, we are not waiting to be regulated in order to make the environment safer for children. For over a decade now, we have been working on child safety, or child online protection, coming up with different policies, tools and resources, as well as partnerships to address this. So the Teen Accounts is one initiative that we’ve developed to address child online safety. It’s an account designed to help parents and their teens feel confident with the time the teen is spending on social media platforms, ensuring that they are safe and experience age-appropriate experiences that make them have positive experiences on social media. So, it does respond to a lot of regulatory concern.

 Is Nigeria the first country in Africa where you are launching the Teen Account?

No. We are launching across Africa. We did our first launch in South Africa in May, then we followed up closely with Nigeria, just to ensure that we are bringing more awareness to the existence of teen accounts. You know Nigeria has many young people who are using social media. The country has teens who are using social media. And so we know parents in Nigeria also want to feel confident that their teens can use social media to connect and explore their interests without having to worry about unsafe and inappropriate experiences. So as I mentioned, we’ve been spending over a decade working on this issue, and so for us, launching this in Nigeria, is very important to us, because we want the teens in Nigeria to have access to this new feature made for them. That would allow them to enjoy Instagram, and have safe and age-appropriate experiences.

How is this teen’s account different from a normal Instagram account?

So with teen accounts, we have applied the strictest safety and privacy features by default. It has features that include limiting interactions with unknown adults, restrictions on certain types of content, as well as built-in tools that give parents more oversight over what their teens are doing. So these protections are enabled automatically.

Do parents have visibility or control over how their teen uses Instagram?

Yes. Within the teen accounts, we have the parental supervision feature, which is available for 13 to 15-year-olds, meaning that for these teens to access or use teen accounts, they will be enrolled automatically. All teens are enrolled automatically, but parents are able to use a parental supervision tool to set a time limit on. You will know how much time your teenagers spend on Instagram; monitor who they meet online, who they are following, and also the reports they are making, which is very important for them to understand. The parents can also approve or deny the safety settings put in place. And so they have the sensitive control feature, which limits the kind of content that the child interacts with and the parent has access to make sure that if they want to turn it off, which we do not recommend, they can do so. What this means is that anything they are doing requires parental approval. Whatever the child is doing on the phone, the parent is able to see it. But there are limitations because we also have to consider child privacy. I can tell you a little bit about how we enroll teens into the accounts, which is automatic. They will receive safety notice or a notice on their Instagram, just letting them know that they have been enrolled onto teen account, and they can send a link to their parents so that they can enable the parental supervision feature. So, once the parent turns on the parental supervision feature, they’re able to put in place time limits. For instance, saying that I only want my child to spend two hours, or less than 30 minutes or I want to limit using the phone when we’re having dinner or having homework. We also have sleep mode, where the parents can set a limit on the notifications that come in when the child is sleeping, meaning that it turns off the notifications. The parent is also able to see the friends list or the followers’ list of that child and know who exactly is your child interacting with. You know teens don’t want things to be imposed on them. They want the parents or guardians to have more oversight, not necessarily control. They want to enjoy the internet, and I know a lot of parents approach the internet from a place of fear. But when you put in place an environment where they can have such a conversation, then you demystify a lot of things, and you are able to build trust, which is very important in addressing safety issues. As a parent, you want when your teen sees something on the internet that he or she is not comfortable about, to call you.

These safety measures, have they been tested?

Since the launch of the Teen Accounts globally, we have seen that 94 percent of teens have been enrolled. Also, 97 percent of the parents who were surveyed by a research commissioned by Meta also said their children find the teen accounts to be very beneficial to them. It’s something that we’re seeing that has great results everywhere we’ve been launching. We recently launched in South Africa. The reception was great from both the policymakers, from the parents, as well as the teens.

What measures are you taking to ensure that you sensitise communities and groups that have expressed concerns about child internet users?

Having events like the one we had the day we launched the Teens Account in Nigeria, where we brought in various stakeholders, parents, creators and influencers, who can share this information on their social media pages is one. We also have government officials from the agencies that are responsible for child online protection. We were even in Abuja, where we had a roundtable with stakeholders such as  policymakers and civil society.

Specifically highlight those things Meta is doing to safeguard teens online?

As I mentioned, for over a decade, safety has been the focus for us and has been a priority. We’ve developed policies. We restrict the age, making sure that we do not allow anyone below the age of 13 to set up accounts. We have policies that do not allow Child Sexual Abuse material on our platforms and go beyond that to address bullying, harassment, and nude content.

Any content that would not be appropriate for teens who are using our platforms, we want to make sure that they do not have access to such. We also have tools that we’ve developed to address some of the concerns. These are tools that proactively scan our platforms for child sexual abuse material and take it down before it even surfaces on the platform; tools to report disturbing contents. We have tools like muting and restricting just to ensure that you’re able to control that experience. Further to this, we work closely with safety experts in Nigeria. We have good partnerships with the Junior Achievement Nigeria, with the CCHUB, and others, to ensure that we are also learning more about the environment in Nigeria and putting in place programs. We have digital literacy programs that have trained hundreds to thousands of Nigerian teenagers, parents, and educators on digital literacy, which includes online safety. We’ve also worked on an Instagram parent safety guide, which offers information on how to stay safe on Instagram, and especially help parents and guardians to help teens navigate Instagram safely. This was launched in collaboration with CCHUB, and it is being made available. We also have a community which then takes all these things we have launched in Lagos, Abuja, down to the community, because they have those relationships with the community. But we it’s not enough, we need to do more, and that’s why, for us, it’s very important to keep on building that partnerships with the government, the civil society organisations to get this information in the school, because we believe it’s very important.