Podcast Episode 407: From Helpless to Heard: How Schools Can Now Take on Instagram Drama Transcripts

Please note: Transcripts for the No Guilt Mom Podcast were created using AI. As a result, there may be some minor errors.

JoAnn Crohn (00:00)

Welcome to the no guilt mom podcast. I’m your host JoAnn Crohn joined here by the brilliant Brie Tucker.

Brie Tucker (00:06)

Why hello everybody, how are you?

JoAnn Crohn (00:08)

Oh my gosh. So Brie, screen time and kids and kids on the internet. It is a frequent topic of conversation here on the podcast both but also like you see it online, you see our balance members come to us asking questions about it. And it’s a huge fear to among moms.

Brie Tucker (00:25)

I think a big piece of it is because, you know, we didn’t have this degree growing up. Our generation is a little bit of the F around and find out, right? There are plenty of things that my parents still don’t know that I did because thank God social media was not a thing. Right? And now it’s like, we don’t know all that stuff is like, it’s new. And it’s kind of like, how are we supposed to handle it? We can’t look back on our past and go, well, this is how my parents did it.

JoAnn Crohn (00:43)

⁓

We have no experience in it as kids ourselves. So of course we are worried about it as parents for our kids. And so what better to go directly to the source and ask all the questions. And that’s who we have here with us today helping us through this. Tara Hopkins is the global director of policy at Instagram where she leads work on youth wellbeing, the creator economy and regulatory issues. She joined Instagram in 2019 as head of policy for Europe.

Middle East and Africa after senior roles at Rio Tinto, the NSPCC and in the European Parliament and Commission. Originally from County Wicklow, Ireland, Tara holds degrees in history, politics and European integration and is a mom to a 12 year old and a 15 year old. And we are so excited to talk with Tara today. Let’s get on with the show.

Welcome Tara to the podcast. We’re so excited to have you here and talk all things Instagram and how parents can be more aware and have more control over what their kids are doing.

Tara Hopkins (02:02)

Thank you for having me. I’m really excited. I’m really, really looking forward to the conversation.

Brie Tucker (02:07)

I love especially that and nothing against anyone who’s not a mom, but I love especially that you are a mom because in a mom to teens because this is something that like, know, when my kids were five, I didn’t worry about. didn’t, but once they start to hit that middle school age, it’s going to come at you one way or another, even if you don’t have your kids on social media, because there’s other kids that are, and they’re going to be talking about it. So you were right there with us in this. You were right in the trenches.

Tara Hopkins (02:38)

I do feel like I’m in the trenches. And I particularly feel like it because I’ve had my two children, I have a daughter who’s 15, about to be 16, and then my son is younger. And I think how boys and girls develop and they experience social media and the apps they’re interested in. know, Anna, my oldest, my daughter is interested more in probably Instagram and TikTok, my son more YouTube. And so they’re very different experiences and trying to parent that.

Even when I’m coming out as someone who works on this day in day out, I find it really hard. And so I do take what I learn at work and bring it home, but I also bring a lot of what I learn at home and bring it to work. And so I do feel quite privileged that I can do that.

JoAnn Crohn (03:23)

You’re in such a fascinating position there. And honestly, as a parent, it makes me feel better that you’re here with kids and you’re using it to shape the decisions and policy of the social media platforms. Because I’m interested, like from your point of view, this kind of, I see it as this fear that’s rampant on social media among parents about social media providers, like really hacking into kids’ brain. You know, they say they’re used to like all of these techniques and strategies and algorithms.

What is your view on all of this fear out there?

Tara Hopkins (03:55)

I think it’s multi-layered. Some of it is very genuine. think, know, parents of today, if you have teenagers or pre-teens, you’re probably in your 40s at the time. so, you know, yeah, we all are. So you personally did not go through this. You did not grow up with social media. And of course, the fear of the unknown. So you might use social media in your everyday life and you probably enjoy it. I love social media. you know, I… Yeah. So, and it brings joy and fun. But of course you worry about what is the experience that my teen is having because I can’t relate to that because as a teenager, I didn’t have social media. So I think some of that fear is just fear of the unknown. I also think that, you know, I think you worry about your teens no matter what era you live in, you worry about your teens.

it is a really tough period for parents. They are going from being, you know, kind of everything that they did was with you to becoming more autonomous. And, know, as parents, the things you want to be able to do is to be able to nurture them and develop them that they do have autonomy as they become adults. So this is a really tricky period anyway for parents, right? So, and I think that’s fair. I also think that social media, maybe we haven’t done a brilliant job at really supporting parents and speaking to parents and really trying to reassure parents and certainly that’s something that I would say has changed at Instagram and Met in the last few years is that we have done huge amounts of work of talking to and working with experts and that’s really important. We’ve got a long history of doing that but more recently we’ve spent a lot of time just going directly to the source, going directly to moms and dads and having those conversations with them and saying okay

We hear you, we understand your concerns, tell us directly what you’re worried about. So that’s what’s really, I think, changed at Instagram and Met in the last few years. And because of that, we have changed some of our products and we have launched some really exciting and new products that we think really do give parents that reassurance. And I’m happy to jump in and talk about some of those to help some of the parents who are listening.

JoAnn Crohn (06:04)

Yeah, I like this point of view, Tara, because you talk about giving parents reassurance because there is this sort of echo chamber that exists out there where you see one headline about how social media is like bad for kids. And I see it out there just in everyday conversation. I mean, I am a mountain biking coach for my son’s mountain biking team. And we’re just riding along and we pass a random hiker. And the first thing the hiker says, I’m glad you guys are out here doing this instead of on your phones.

Brie Tucker (06:32)

Gosh, yeah.

JoAnn Crohn (06:33)

I mean, this is how prevalent it is this worry and it is really judgemental.

Tara Hopkins (06:38)

teenagers can have incredibly multifaceted lives where they can be on their mountain bike, they can be doing their homework, they can be socializing with their friends and they can also have a really meaningful and enriching experience on social media and they can do all of those things all at the same time in the same day and I think I do sometimes worry that my generation, our generation can be judgmental because

Tara Hopkins (07:09)

We look at them and think, ⁓ well, we were playing in tree houses. If we’d have social media, we would have loved it.

Brie Tucker (07:13)

Yeah.

JoAnn Crohn (07:16)

We would!

Brie Tucker (07:17)

Well, we’re the generation of talk to the hands. So yeah, we definitely have that. I do want to throw in another positive aspect of social media, and I’m going to throw JoAnn on this one. There’s all kinds of things that it can be helpful for. For instance, JoAnn, your daughter found an amazing internship over the summer on social media.

JoAnn Crohn (07:35)

Yeah. yeah. mean, things that did not exist for us as kids, just looking at even the college process. My daughter’s a high school senior and the fact that she could see the lives of students at each university and things that were never opened to us and possibilities that were never like brought to our doorstep are brought to their doorstep with social media and I love what you said, Tara, about the judgmental thing, because I always bring it back to you when parents are afraid of social media and afraid of this. I’m like, guys, do you know what the pushback was against the printing press and books?

JoAnn Crohn (08:17)

Same conversation.

Brie Tucker (08:19)

Kids are gonna spend all day reading.

Do you know what’s gonna happen? They won’t be working in the factories. No, I’m joking.

JoAnn Crohn (08:26)

It’s true though!

Tara Hopkins (08:29)

We do, but it has an impact on teens because if you feel like your parents are judgmental, then you don’t want to talk to them about the thing that they want to talk to you about, whether it’s a funny thing. So it might be, I’ve been really trying to encourage my daughter to share reels and stories because actually it’s fun. So she comes across something that makes her laugh. I would say like, share with me. I’d love to see that. I’d love to do this. And you can, that’s a positive and a funny experience that you can do together. So whereas if…

if you take a judgmental approach to which is always, well, you shouldn’t be on your phone, you shouldn’t be on social media. And they’re not gonna share with you either the joy, but also they’re not gonna share with you if something does go wrong or they see something that they wish they hadn’t seen because you as parents, you want to be there for them if they do see something that they wish they hadn’t seen you as a mom, that’s how you are supposed to support your child. So I think keeping that conversation open and just trying to not be judgmental, trying to be, and always positive, look.

Of course, social media, like anything else in the world, is not 100 % positive, but actually coming from the perspective of your teen, majority of the time, having a really positive experience. They really are. But you want to be there for them for the one or the 2 % of the time that maybe something happens that they want to talk to you about and to keep that dialogue.

JoAnn Crohn (09:46)

Absolutely. And I know parents out there also want to know like how can they keep their kids safe in a way that’s not judgmental. And Tara, we’re going to get into that right after this. So Tara, in your line of work, you are the global director of policy at Instagram. And I know that Instagram has put together a lot of features for parents to actually help their kids manage social media and help parents feel more in control and know what’s going on, but like not in a judgmental way. So like

A parent out there right now whose kids are on Instagram, what do you recommend they do to help, first of all, help their kids be safe and also so that they know what’s going on?

Tara Hopkins (10:28)

So the first thing I would say is please have some comfort and be reassured that there are many, people at Meta and at Instagram who have your back as a parent. So what we’ve done is we’ve gone out and had very deep conversations with parents, parenting experts across the US over the last couple of years. And parents told us three things that they’re worried about when their teen is using social media more broadly, but Instagram specifically obviously is what we were asking them about.

So one is contact. So who can contact my teen when they’re using social media? Who can DM them? Is it someone that they know or is it a stranger? And every parent’s worst nightmare is that their teen can be contacted by a stranger and something might happen. So that’s one thing that the parents, no matter where they were, told us they were concerned about. The second was about content. So what kind of content are they seeing? Is it age appropriate? Is the kind of content that I would want my teenager to be seeing when they’re on explore or in reels or stories on Instagram. And then the third one, which is really more about, I think, the phone and inverted comments is the time that they’re spending on their phone. Is it the right amount of time? You know, you when you’re when you’ve got children who are very young, you go to the the pediatrician and you say, you know, I’m worried about them. They’ve got this, you know, scar or this rash or whatever. Whereas when it comes to using their phone, no one is able to tell you it should be 20 minutes or it should be one hour. It really depends on what your teenager is doing on their phone for that.

JoAnn Crohn (12:00)

That’s funny. It reminds me of taking my son to the pediatrician and they have this like zip code they use at the pediatrician’s office, which is I think it’s this Beverly Hills zip code 90210. But one of the numbers stands for two hours of screen time. And the pediatrician is telling my son this and my son’s like nodding. And as soon as we get off, get out of the office, he’s like, Mom, that is totally unrealistic. Like I am on that device for school all the time. There is no way, no way. like what you were saying right there is totally true.

Brie Tucker (12:29)

100 % agree with that because when my kids started high school, I was shocked how much they actually needed. Like when my son started high school, he had to have his phone in the beginning because they didn’t have a laptop system yet at the high school. So he, he was told, bring in your cell phone. We’re going to be working on it. And, and I do find it interesting how here we are. This is five years later now, cause my son’s a freshman in college. We’re all shocked that kids are on their phones all the time in school. And it’s like, well, they need tech.

Tara Hopkins (13:03)

Yeah, and look, we don’t take a view of it from an Instagram perspective, but if you’re using your phone to access apps that are helping you to learn, then that’s part of your educational journey. And of course, that’s OK, which is why I say it’s the phone rather than one or any specific app.

Brie Tucker (13:21)

Exactly, and I think that’s what people focus too much on or which and that’s just Brie’s opinion

Tara Hopkins (13:27)

I think that’s because of the app maybe that you use that you then project and you say, they’re spending too much time on Instagram. 

Brie Tucker (13:36)

I spend too much time on Instagram and TikTok. 

JoAnn Crohn (13:39)

always look to yourself. Look to yourself first and see what’s going on and then project that model. ⁓

Tara Hopkins (13:46)

What we’ve tried to do, or we have done at Instagram is hearing those three themes coming up over again, contact, your teen spending. We developed what’s called teen accounts. So again, for parents who are listening, we launched this in the US back in September. It’s launched around the world now as well. We started in the US and what we’ve done is we’ve defaulted every teen who we know to be under the age of 18 into our most restrictive settings on Instagram.

And that means they’re restricted for who can contact them. They can only be contacted by other accounts that they know or are connected with already. We’re very, very strict about who can contact a teen, anyone under the age of 18. We then have put all the teens that we know under the age of 18 into our most restrictive setting for content. It’s called our sensitive content control, which means that teens who are in the teen account experience are only seeing content that is appropriate for them.

And then the third thing we’ve done is we’re defaulting teens that they have a 60 minute limit on Instagram on a daily basis. That’s just defaulted on for every single teen in the US who’s under the age of 18 who’s using Instagram. We can talk a little bit about how we know and understand age, but that’s based on state of the age. We’ve then gone a step further, again, listening to parents, which is for the younger teens. So if you’ve got a teen between the ages of 13 and 15,

What we really heard from parents was they want those teenagers to have a more restrictive experience. And ideally, as parents want to be more involved and kind of more in control of that experience. Parents also recognise you’ve got older teens. Actually, they do want a bit more autonomy. And as a parent of an older teen, you’re like, OK, I feel good about that. Whereas if your teen is 13 and 14, you want to be more involved. So what we’ve done with the Teen Accounts is that if you are under the age of 16 and you try to change any of these settings. So let’s say, for instance, you’re in a private account by default when you’re in a teen account experience. So when you first join Instagram, you’re put into a private account. If you’re under 16, you can’t change that to a public account unless you get your parent to approve that. that’s true. And I love that. Yeah. Let’s say you have a private account, you’re a teen. It also means, you know, you’re very restricted as to who can contact you when you’re in a private account. And that’s what parents want for the younger teen. If the teen wants to change and say, hey, I’m ready to have a public account, what we really hope is that the supervisory experience that we push the parent and the teen into on Instagram, because frankly we do in order for to approve that, you really hope it means they’re having an offline conversation, right? They’re driving to football or they’re having breakfast or you’re having your nighttime chat or whatever it is. And you’re saying, hey, I saw that you wanted a public account on Instagram.

How come? What do you feel as you’re being restricted about? And so that often, sorry, conversation we hope is happening and then you can approve it or if you’re the parent you say, you know what, not for another year, I still watched it, I’ve a private account, I don’t feel good about it, I’d rather wait. And so they’re the kinds of conversations we’re hoping will happen between the parent and the teen.

JoAnn Crohn (17:02)

Yeah, and they happen. They happen. I mean, my daughter, as soon as she turned 16, she came to me with her phone. She’s like, Mom, can you approve this, please? And can I get a public account? Yeah, because, she so she’s communications director in her student government. So she is on Instagram a lot because she is posting on behalf of the school, as well as she has in the past done fan accounts, which she’s been really good about. Like she had a Taylor Swift fan account. She’s like, well, look, I grew this to so much. So much.

Tara Hopkins (17:11)

Really.

Brie Tucker (17:29)

She has an amazing Christmas is coming account. love that one.

JoAnn Crohn (17:32)

She has a Christmas countdown account where it was just like fun Christmas stuff that she wanted to connect with other Christmas, you know, so just all depends like what you said, like where is your child in the amount of social media savvy is kind of like what you’re looking at as a parent.

Tara Hopkins (17:49)

Yeah, you know your team better than anyone else, better than any teacher, educator, certainly anyone at a social media company like Instagram. know, we try as much as we can to build that experience, but you as the parent, you know your team and you might have a 14 year old who’s actually very mature or you might have a 14 year old who actually is not, hasn’t matured yet. And so you want to keep them in, a slightly more cocooned experience. Yeah. And what we did with supervision. So if you do set it up, so if you’re, if your team,

Well, change the settings, as I say, we kind of force you frankly into a supervisor experience. But you can, as a parent, you can set that up anyway, if you want to. So you could go into Instagram and into your settings, it’s really easy to find and you can set up parental supervision. And that means that for those parents who do want to go that extra, they can look at other things. So they could restrict the time that their teen is spending on Instagram. So they could just completely block Instagram for 23 and a half hours of the day if they wanted to using the supervisory experience. We would hope they would have a conversation with their teen about that, but a parent could do that. A parent can also see who their teen follows and who’s following their teen. So they have a bit more insight into the accounts that the accounts your teen is following. And they can also look at not into the direct messages, your messaging part of Instagram, but… a parent can look at and see who their teen has been messaging over the last seven days. This was an area that was really hard to get right. And we spoke to so many experts around this because some parents would like to see the direct messages. They want to see exactly the conversations that their teen is having. Other parents said, no, that feels like it’s kind of opening the diary. But I’d like to have some insights. so

JoAnn Crohn (19:37)

Hmm.

Tara Hopkins (19:40)

We’ve set up insights so parents can see the last seven days who their teen has been communicating with. And again, we really hope that that means they’re having offline conversations about this. Who is that account? I’ve never heard of them. Is that a, you don’t have to have your real name on Instagram. So it could be a great friend from school that the parent knows, but the parent just doesn’t know what their Instagram handle is. having those kind of offline conversations, but giving the parent some insights that allows them to have some of those.

Because some teams just go silent, right?

Brie Tucker (20:11)

What I’m hearing a lot of being restated here is that Instagram is trying to walk that fine line of giving the parents the safety features that would be responsible safety features for children or for our younger generation to be using the social media app. However, I’m hearing a lot of support, which is something that we say all the time here at No Guilt Bomb, about having the conversation with your kids.

The one thing that we know so far, because we don’t know the long-term impact of all of this, just like JoAnn said, like back in the press days, I’m like, what’s gonna happen if all the kids are reading books? But what we do know is that it needs to be something where we are having ongoing conversations. And I love that you are aware of that and that you guys are encouraging that. So, yeah.

JoAnn Crohn (21:03)

And along those lines too, there are certain risks that are happening today in our age, such as cyber bullying and online predators. And we’re gonna discuss how the tools and policies you guys are putting out on Instagram are helping parents navigate that right after this. So Tara here, it feels scary to be a parent in 2025 because there are so many things that we did not have to deal with just because we didn’t have the online landscape things like cyber bullying and online predators. So at this time when we recorded this in 2025, there’s a really popular documentary on Netflix called Unknown Number about catfishing that happens to a high schooler, a middle school student. What kind of policies does Instagram have in place to help parents feel better about the threats that are facing their kids right now through social media?

Tara Hopkins (21:54)

Yeah, it’s so important. And I think it is, it’s a very real and genuine concern from parents because as adults, we’ve also seen a huge rise in scamming and fraud. And many of us have been victims of that. look, absolutely. It’s really important. you teenagers are more vulnerable to this than maybe adults, but sometimes they’re more savvy. But so we’ve done a number of things. First of all, within the Tina Count experience,

We talked about it before, but we really do restrict who a teenager can follow and who’s following them back. So that’s really important that there are people that they know that they’re already connected with. However, if a teen is connected with someone who maybe has nefarious ideas, we have put in a number of tools and a number of safety features to try to help them to stop that and to give the teen the support that they need immediately and going forward. there’s a number of things that we do. First of all,

A lot of scammers are, they’re really adversarial and they change their tactics all the time. So we work very closely with experts and with law enforcement to understand how some of these tactics do change. But for teens, you’re in your DMs and you get contacted, say by someone who you don’t know. What we do is we actually in the direct message, and this was launched back in July of this year, in the direct message, we’re giving teens extra safety notices. So we are saying to them, this account was established and that we give them the date that the account was established. And we also tell them that the account is actually not in the country that they’re in. So this account is not in the US. Yeah. And I think that’s really important because the team might think, this looks like someone who’s in middle school, you know, up the road. And then they get told by us, no, this account was established only about two weeks ago and is not in the US. So that then gives the team some information that they might need to pause for thought.

And then we also give them the ability. I mean, they can always block an account, but we give them the ability to block and report the account because we really want to know that there’s an account out there that’s trying to do this. We also have restricted, and we’ve been doing this for a long time, accounts that we would describe as scammy. So that is an account. They may not have necessarily violated our policies because if they violate our policies, we remove them from the platform. But if they are…

There are accounts that, let’s say, they’ve been blocked by a number of teens over a period of time, or they’ve been sending out friend requests, a lot of friend requests over a very short period of time. They’re the kinds of behaviors that we look at. Now, we don’t tell the public everything that we look for because, as I said, this is very adversarial and we’ll just try and get ahead of it. But we use a number of ways. And so if we see that an account has some kind of spammy behavior, we will not allow that account to connect with a teen.

So we try to stop it at that point as well. But then if they can or if they do, we then give the team in the direct messages a number of extra information that they understand. And we send them safety notices. We say to them, don’t feel under any pressure to respond to this person. And look, if the worst case scenario happens and a teenager does actually, because often what this kind of behavior, which is so horrible, is…

Tara Hopkins (25:09)

that they try to convince a teenager to send them an intimate image. And boys can be young, young teenage boys can be particularly susceptible to this, unfortunately. Not only teenage boys, but they can be. And teenage boys are not great at talking to their parents about things that might happen on social media. Sometimes girls can be a bit more open. That’s sweeping generalization, but that’s the experience I’ve had with my children is that, so indirect messages, you cannot send a nude.

in a direct message is filtered out for the team. if someone tries to send a team a nude photograph or picture in the PMs, we filter that out. That’s again in the team account experience. And we will tell the team that they can report that account if they wish to. It could be benign. I don’t want to scare parents because it could be like an aunt sending a photograph of a cousin in the back or something. But look, we do want to take a precautionary approach.

Brie Tucker (26:04)

Exactly. It makes me feel better knowing that you guys are being extra cautious about it. ⁓

Tara Hopkins (26:09)

Yeah, I think so. I think so.

JoAnn Crohn (26:12)

And it feels better too that you are ahead of it because what you said right there, you’re not telling the public everything you’re doing because you’re trying to get ahead of the scammers. Because if you made it public knowledge, they just changed their tactics right away.

Tara Hopkins (26:24)

We want to give teens as much information as we can to make sure that they’re making the right decisions. it’s someone they don’t know, they have all the information at hand and then they can decide what they want to Hopefully have a conversation with their parents. I just want to do a shout out for Take It Down, which is a brilliant organization, which is if a teen has shared an intimate image, just say, don’t panic, talk to your parents. And as a parent, don’t be judgmental because we all make mistakes.

But take it down.nekmek.org is a brilliant organization in the US. You can contact them and they’ll explain to you what you can do in order to be able to have that intimate image removed. Obviously we would remove it on the Instagram end, but what you don’t want that you think it’s out there somewhere on the YouTube. So take it down.nekmek, which is N-C-M-E-C.org is a brilliant organization that helps us to make sure that we’re there for teens when the worst case scenario happens to them.

that they don’t lose faith, actually that there are lots of organisations that are out there to

JoAnn Crohn (27:24)

That’s a great organization to know about, definitely. And as kids go into this back to school season, Tara, there’s a huge thing actually here in Arizona, for instance, cell phones just got banned in the classroom. But Instagram is doing some reach out and some stuff with schools too. Tell us about that and how parents can work alongside Instagram.

Tara Hopkins (27:46)

Yeah, this is really exciting because we started to pilot this concept last year and on September 25th we’re launching the Schools Partnership Programme in the US and this is all middle and high schools across the US which is really exciting. That is exciting. And what partnership is, it’s about connecting the school directly to Instagram effectively.

So it is allowing the school to be able to report content or accounts to us directly. We give them 48 hours and we’ll act on that report. This is to help schools particularly around bullying and harassment.

Brie Tucker (28:24)

I gonna say that would be immensely helpful.

Tara Hopkins (28:28)

Yes, bullying can be very, very contextual. So we have a number of tools already on Instagram and some of very well known like the restrict tool or the hidden words tool. All of these are integrated into the teen account experience. Also brilliant for adults who are using Instagram as well. But look, it is contextual. And so a school might have a particular issue with bullying that is related to a football game or something that happened in that school that

As Instagram, we might not understand the context of that, and therefore we might not be able to take the content down because we don’t have the full context of that. This allows the school to be able to get in touch with us directly and be able to report content. And because we know it’s coming in through the school, we know that we need to take action on it. So it’s a brilliant partnership, as I said, it’s been piloted in the past. We piloted it with the…

a school in Connecticut and the principal has said some really wonderful things about it. we feel that educators are seeing benefit of it. So that’s why we’re going to be launching it across the US to middle and high school starting in September.

JoAnn Crohn (29:32)

my gosh, Tara, I see the benefit of it right now because there have been conversations I’ve had with my daughter and things I’ve heard back from the school. And the school is like, well, we have no control over what’s online. We can’t control it. And this like gives them direct control of it so that they don’t feel so hopeless.

Tara Hopkins (29:48)

They don’t feel so helpless. they again, I think a lot of educators do feel quite overwhelmed, right? They’re brilliant jobs. It’s really hard. They’ve got full classrooms back to school as parents. We’re probably all thinking kind of few that are teenagers are no longer in the house. But yeah, education can feel really overwhelmed. And in the same way that I think sometimes we feel that the phone can be a bone of contention in the household. I’m sure phones feel like they’re a big bone of contention in school. So we really want to help schools and health educators alleviate some of that, do they feel like there is a program that’s built specifically for them? And it can be any content, but I think it is specifically, I think, beneficial for bullying and harassment.

Brie Tucker (30:31)

So I have a question about that, that program. So what I’m hearing is that if the school has a concern about an account, which is probably brought up then by a student or multiple students, they can report that account to you at Instagram. And you all will immediately take action of reviewing it, looking at everything. And you will take on the responsibility of making sure that that account is on the up and up.

Tara Hopkins (31:01)

No, you’re absolutely right. We would review the account. Or it might be just one piece of content. It might be an entire account because on Instagram you can report pieces of content, just one piece of content. You could report a DM. You can report anything on Instagram, a reel, anything. But the school has the ability to report both a piece of content. And it could be a bunch of teenagers from another school. ⁓

And then we would hope that it would help a conversation to happen between the two schools as well, because hopefully all of the schools will have the ability to be in the program. But that’s exactly right. It’s that the school, as you said, has an outlet, has a pathway that they can communicate with us and they can report to us. And then we know because we know it’s a school that we’re going to take it very seriously and that we have more of the context than we would maybe normally have if someone just randomly sends something to us for review.

Brie Tucker (31:57)

As a parent, I’m going to be telling my kid that this exists now. Because I think in the past, they’re kind of like, well, I can’t do anything about it. It’s Instagram. I have no control over that. And we can be like, no, now you do.

JoAnn Crohn (32:00)

Me too, yeah.

Tara Hopkins (32:12)

And I think reporting is reporting to us or three years ago is really important because what we do, know, a lot of this is AI, but if something is reported to us, it is dealt with. So it will go into the system. You know, we will usually send you a message to say we’re dealing with it, but it also helps our AI systems to better understand the kinds of content that’s being reported to us. And like I said, when it comes to bullying, it is highly contextual. So. The good example is emoji, the use of emoji. So the vast majority of people use emojis for fun and humor. that’s kind of what they’re for. But some people use emojis to bully, right? And that team might know that that particular emoji that is being used to comment or to tag them is like…

Brie Tucker (32:58)

In a harmful way. And it’s so funny, JoAnn, have you run into this with your kids and Tara as well? Like where you think an emoji means one thing?

JoAnn Crohn (33:08)

General words in particular are different meanings to my teens than they are in ⁓

Brie Tucker (33:15)

It’s hard to keep on top of that. Especially if they won’t like fess up and tell you the decoding of it. And you’re like, what’s that mean? Why are you laughing at me?

Tara Hopkins (33:23)

We have brilliant teams at Meta. mean, Meta is a big company and there’s teams that do pretty much everything. We’ve got brilliant teams whose job it is to keep up to date with how emojis and how certain phrases are being used. You can imagine this is really hard to do at a global scale, which is where AI is so incredible, and being able to kind of teach the system with some of these. But sometimes it is just, you know, overnight an emoji can… the use of an emoji could completely change. And we try to get it right, but we don’t always get it right. Like we never say that we’ll always be a hundred percent perfect, but certainly there are teams that that’s what they do day in, day out is trying to understand the use of words and emojis in a bullying context. So we were able to take action.

JoAnn Crohn (34:05)

This is so fascinating. Well, you shared so much with us, Tara, and like, I actually have some action steps I’m going to take for my son’s Instagram account, who’s 12, just to go and check on a few things, make sure I have some sense. Well, you should. Be 13. Well, yes, but I also have a login information we talk a lot about.

Tara Hopkins (34:25)

Yeah, really important because, you know, we talked before, you know, parents know their teens best. And if an account is like pretty much managed by the parents, you know, you deciding, you know, we say you should be 13 to join Instagram, and we build Instagram for 13. But parents, you know, your teen, and so you can decide, you know, okay, I’ll let you look at my Instagram account, I’ll let you see how it works. Now the Instagram account that you as an adult has

will look and feel so different to an Instagram account that a teenager has because of all of the protections and tools that we have in place. you know, what we call it the age gate account. So we only allow teens to see certain accounts. You know, we have very strict rules around this. And this is a piece of work that we’re really delving into even further now. So some things will come later on in the year around helping parents to understand the way we rank age-appropriate content. And so what the experiences that you’re having on Instagram is actually very different to the experience that your team is having on Instagram. yeah, I think, yeah, but look, having conversations with your team and…

JoAnn Crohn (35:33)

It’s a cooperative thing where I have his login. looked at his account all the time. We have lots of conversations about it. It’s how to educate kids as well to educate kids on social media and how to, how to interact on it as well. But something that we always end with Tara is what is something coming up for you that you are excited about in your personal.

Tara Hopkins (35:39)

Keep those conversations going in my personal life. Look at my teens have also gone back to school and just last week here in the UK. So I am honestly really excited about being able to have a bit of time to do some exercise. It’s your weeks because that just completely went out the window during the entire summer. So I’m excited about that. I’m also excited. going to be in the US for work in September and October. And I absolutely love traveling to the US. So I’m excited about that. They’re the two things, exercise and a bit of work but fun travel.

Brie Tucker (36:25)

I think all of us celebrate a little when our kids go back to school. only year I remember not celebrating is when they were in kindergarten. After that, I’m like, have fun. See you later.

JoAnn Crohn (36:37)

Pretty much pretty much. Well, thank you Tara for everything that you have shared with us today And for all of you out there remember the best mom is a happy mom. Take care of you and we’ll talk to you later

Brie Tucker (36:50)

Thanks for stopping by.

JoAnn Crohn (36:54)

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