Meta now lets parents see what topics their teens are discussing with AI

Meta is adding more supervision tools to help parents see what their children are doing on social media. The latest feature is a new report that will give parents insights into the topics their teenagers have been discussing with Meta AI.

Parents using supervision on Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram will see a new Insights tab that shows the topics their teen has asked Meta AI about over the past seven days. The dashboard will automatically group topics into broad categories like school, entertainment, health and wellbeing, travel, and so on. Parents can tap into each one to see more specific subcategories.

For sensitive topics, Meta says more is coming. The company is developing alerts to notify parents if their teens are searching for harmful content on the platform or asking AI harmful questions, more precisely, questions about suicide and self-harm. Those alerts were announced in February; however, Meta still hasn’t rolled the feature out to the public.

The new Insights tab also includes conversation starter templates, developed with the Cyberbullying Research Center. So, in case you’re not sure how to approach your kid about what they’re talking about with Meta AI, these should give you an idea of how to start.

Meta also said it’s putting together an AI Wellbeing Expert Council, a group of researchers affiliated with institutions like the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California. These experts should help the company tailor its services to be better suited for providing safe AI experiences for teenagers.

The feature is now live for parents supervising Teen Accounts in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Brazil, with a global rollout coming in the following weeks.

Meta says the number of US teens enrolled in supervision has more than doubled since last year. However, we still don’t have the exact number. When I started covering Meta’s AI features, I mentioned that I find it hard to believe that too many teenagers would agree to being supervised by their parents, and I still stand by that. Hopefully, I’m wrong.

Source: Meta