I asked Instagram the questions every parent wants to know
About this episode
Lucie Fink interviews Tara Hopkins from Instagram about the platform's features for teen accounts and parental concerns.
A few months ago I posted about attending an Instagram event in New York City, where they walked me through Teen Accounts. This is a feature now used by hundreds of millions of teenagers worldwide. The reaction split my audience right down the middle. Parents of teens thanked me for sharing it, while parents of young kids (myself included) responded with skepticism. So I decided to go straight to the source. Today I'm sitting down with Tara Hopkins, who works in policy at Instagram. My kids are still young, so phones and social media still feel like a distant (and sometimes terrifying) hypothetical for future me. But it's already a big topic of conversation in my house, and I had a lot of questions. Tara's career path alone is worth the listen: from the European Parliament in Brussels, to the UK's largest child protection charity, to Instagram in her early 40s, when she said she "wanted to start to learn again." She's also a mom of two teenagers, 16 and 13, so she's not just building this stuff, she's living it at home, too. In this episode, Tara walks me through how Instagram's AI can detect that a user is a teen even if they lie about their age, why 97% of 13-to-15-year-olds…
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