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.

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…

Millennials in 2021 were twice as likely to live with their parents than baby boomers were when they were young adults, according to a new report — though the high cost of housing isn’t entirely to blame.

The report from Statistics Canada out today analyzed data from three census cycles to compare changing housing dynamics across three generations: millennials, Gen Xers and baby boomers.

StatsCan found that 16.3 per cent of millennials aged 25 to 39 were living with a parent as of 2021, whereas 8.2 per cent of baby boomers were doing the same at those ages in 1991. 

Millennials also had the lowest home ownership rate at those ages, compared to previous generations. Just under half of them — 49.9 per cent — owned their home as of 2021, while 56.2 per cent of Gen Xers did in 2006 and 55.9 per cent of baby boomers in 1991.

The trend was even more pronounced in bigger cities — particularly in Toronto and Vancouver, which have the highest housing costs in the country. In Toronto, 26.1 per cent of millennials in 2021 were living with a parent, as were 19.3 per cent of millennials in Vancouver.

The share of millennials living with a spouse, partner or child was also smaller than past generations. While about three in four baby boomers had that kind of living arrangement in 1991, only 62.8 per cent of millennials did in 2021.

The cost of housing in Canada, which has skyrocketed relative to wages over time, has likely had an impact. Lower-end homes have increased by more than 200 per cent since 2024, young dual-earner household incomes grew by just 76 per cent in that same period, according to a recent CBC News analysis.

And though house prices have begun to dip, including in some big cities, it hasn’t so far been enough to let first-time buyers into the market: TD Economics expects home prices to slide 0.3 per cent across Canada this year.

But Statistics Canada notes that there’s more to the change in patterns than affordability alone.

“Later family formation and longer…

​Instagram said it would notify parents if their teenager repeatedly searches for terms related to suicide or self-harm within a short period, as pressure grows for governments ‌to follow Australia’s ban on the use of social media for people under 16.

Instagram, owned by Meta ​Platforms Inc., said on Thursday it would start alerting ⁠parents who are ⁠signed up to its ‌optional supervision setting if their children try to access suicide or self-harm content. The alerts will begin next week for those signed up in ​Canada, the United States, Britain and Australia.

“These alerts build on our existing work to help protect teens from potentially harmful content on ⁠Instagram,” the platform said in a statement. “We have strict policies against content that promotes or glorifies suicide or self-harm.”

Its existing policy is ‌to block such searches and redirect people to support resources, Instagram said.

Governments are increasingly seeking to protect children from ⁠harm online, particularly after worries over the AI chatbot Grok, which ⁠has generated non-consensual sexualized images.

Britain said in January it was considering restrictions to protect children online, after ​Australia’s move in December. Spain, Greece and ​Slovenia have in recent weeks said they are also looking at limiting access.

In Britain, measures designed to ⁠stop ⁠access to pornography sites ​for children have had implications for adults’ privacy, and have led ​to tension with ⁠the U.S. over limits on free speech and regulatory reach.

Instagram’s “teen accounts” for under-16s need a parent’s permission to change settings, while parents can select an extra layer of monitoring with the agreement ⁠of their teenager. They also block teen users from seeing “sensitive content,” including those that are sexually suggestive or show violence.