Jaipur, August 30, 2024.

Meta, reaffirming its commitment to youth wellbeing, hosted the ‘Talking Digital Suraksha for Teens’ roundtable in Jaipur today. The parent-educator forum was held  in partnership with 1M1B to raise awareness among parents on Meta’s approach to online safety and share best practices for protecting teen wellbeing in the digital world.

The session discussed ways of empowering parents to confidently manage their teen’s usage of personal devices like smartphones – including on Meta’s platforms. It also provided an opportunity to gather valuable insights from parents and educators on teens’ usage of social media and emerging online trends. A select group of educators and parents from 10-15 selected schools in the city attended the roundtable to learn more about digital safety initiatives and share experiences of their teen’s social media journey. Meta also sensitized the attendees on the tools and features it offers on various platforms to ensure a safe social media experience.

Emphasizing the crucial role parents and educators play in a teen’s social media experience, Natasha Jog, Director, Public Policy in India, Instagram, said, “With India at the cusp of being a $1 trillion digital economy, there is a need to protect existing users as well as new users from various kinds of harm. Therefore, we take our role seriously in ensuring that we are constantly working towards building a platform which is safe. The Digital Suraksha initiative includes several measures on enabling digital education and literacy across youth wellbeing, child safety, tackling misinformation as well as overall user awareness towards online safety. Through a series of high impact conversations through these roundtables across India, we are sensitizing parents and educators around how their teens can meaningfully spend time online while staying safe.”

As part of ongoing efforts to strengthen the user safety ecosystem, Meta held the ‘Digital Suraksha Summit’ last year, which was built on a continuous endeavor to provide for a safe and balanced online experience for youth and women. Additionally, Meta has announced a two-year partnership with the Department of Electronics, Information Technology, Biotechnology and Science & Technology (ITBT), Government of Karnataka to empower students across schools and colleges, and educators on information, awareness and education on online safety and digital citizenship.

Over the past three years, Meta has launched 50+ safety tools and features to promote online safety. Recently rolled out features around teen safety include, ‘Night Nudges’, which encourages users to shut down the Instagram app when being used late at night, as well as ‘Quiet Mode’, which help give teen users more control over the time spent on Instagram and what they see. Further, with Instagram’s Parental Supervision feature, parents can view the accounts their child follows, the accounts that follow their children and be more involved in their online experiences. Meta’s ‘Family Center’ also provides parents and teens to find information on how to safely navigate the platforms.