In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook announces news regarding Messenger Kids, the application for children that launched in 2017 in the United States. In addition to the app being available in 70 countries, the social network has released new features that allow young people to have greater independence when it comes to managing the contact list, while maintaining parental supervision.
In recent years, Mark Zuckerberg's company has worked with a team of experts in cybersecurity, child development and the media to "shape" the application, explains Facebook in a statement. And there are challenges that the social network wants to overcome, namely the problems reported by parents regarding the difficulty of finding children's friends, so that they can chat on Messenger Kids. With that in mind, the technological giant is adding three new options.
After announcing new features in February "to give parents even more control", Facebook now launches the Supervised Friending feature. Parents are now able to allow children to accept, reject, add or delete contacts, while still having the possibility to replace any new contact approvals on the panel.
The decision comes after Facebook listens to parents, and realizes that they wanted to "give children more independence when it comes to managing the contact list, while maintaining parental supervision". The social network has already launched this feature in the United States, becoming gradually available in the rest of the countries.
Whenever children accept or reject a friend request, as well as send or delete a friend request, parents will be notified by Messenger and can replace the new calls. To do this, you must access the parent panel, where a set of recent youth activities has been recorded.
In order to ensure that young people understand the new features being launched by Facebook, the technology giant worked with Lewis Bernstein, a member of Facebooks Youth Advisors. For the specialist, "in addition to allowing parents more ways to manage their children's experience, Friended Supervision develops children's autonomy, to decide with whom they want or not to talk". At the same time, "parents can monitor, guide and intervene as needed".
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook presented different measures to combat misinformation and, at the same time, try to liven up the days of those who are at home most of the time. The social network anticipated, for example, the launch of the mobile version of Facebook Gaming, for which it is only available for Android. At the end of March, Instagram announced new updates to keep people "informed, safe and supported". One of them was the launch of a "way to surf" on the social network through video call, Co-Watching.
