Meta will now tell parents if their teens talk about suicide with the
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WARNING: This story contains mentions of suicide and self harm.
Meta has launched new tools to alert parents when their teens talk about suicide or self-harm with the company’s chatbot, Meta AI.
Parents who have set up the supervision feature for their teens on Instagram will get a notification on their own device if a teenage user shows signs of crisis in conversations with Meta AI on any of Meta’s platforms, the company said in a Thursday blog post.
Meta AI is accessible on all Meta platforms including Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, as well as at the standalone Meta.ai website.
The new rules are an expansion of Meta’s guardrails. Prior to this, when a teen suggested they were considering self harm or suicide, the AI chatbot would redirect them to crisis help lines and encourage them to reach out to a parent or other trusted person. If teen Instagram users repeatedly make searches related to self harm and suicide using the platform’s regular search function, that also already triggers a notification to parents.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, says the new feature is live for users in Canada, the U.K., the U.S. and Australia.
The company first said it was working to add a flagging feature to Meta AI in February.
Meta also says it’s working on a tool to contact emergency services when conversations with the chatbot by both adults and teens indicate they might take their own lives.
Though they welcome the measure itself, advocates, experts and kids all say there’s more work to be done.
“Any announcement that puts better tools into the hands of teens and their parents to keep themselves safer online is by definition a good thing,” said London, Ont.-based technology analyst Carmi Levy.
Instagram is rolling out new teen accounts with enhanced parental controls and privacy features, but some parents say Meta still needs to do more to make the platform safe for young users.
Levy says that because no tool like this is perfect, there may be times where it doesn’t flag a conversation where a child is at risk, or where it could produce false positives that alert parent when there is no danger.
Meta says it will start by being overly cautious, notifying parents even when a teen’s intent is ambiguous.
“While that means we may sometimes notify parents when there may not be real cause for concern, we feel this is the right starting point, and we’ll continue to monitor to help make sure we’re in the right place,” read a statement from the company about the new tool.
Levy says parents should remember that the new measure is simply one tool that can help them monitor what their kids are doing online.
“Parents need to take all of this…
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