Instagram announced today the addition of a new feature called "Quiet Mode" to its suite of time management tools. The feature aims to alleviate users' anxiety about taking time away from the app by silencing incoming notifications, auto-replying to DMs, and setting your status to 'In Quiet Mode' to notify friends that you are not currently active on the app. If a teen uses the app late at night, the company will prompt them to enable the feature.
The update is one of several changes that are being rolled out today, including expanded parental control tools and other tools for managing recommendations.
The announcements come as Instagram works to make its app less of a target for regulators and lawmakers concerned about the potential harms of social media, particularly for adolescent users. Instagram has added several teen safety features to date, including those to protect teens' privacy and reduce unwanted adult contact, limit ad targeting, limit teens' access to mature content, and others to assist parents in monitoring and managing their teens' Instagram use through parental controls.
Quiet Mode joins a handful of other screen time management tools Instagram now provides, such as daily time spent controls that allow people to track their app use and send themselves alerts, those to configure "take a break" reminders after individual app sessions exceed a certain amount of time, and various tools to pause, snooze, and unfollow pages, groups, and people to help reduce engagement with addictive or otherwise unwanted content.
However, the goal of the new Quiet Mode feature isn't simply to provide a tool that encourages users to take a break. Instead, it focuses on the real-world consequences of trying to take a break from an app you regularly use — and one where others expect you to be available.
Instagram has become a popular messaging tool for young people in particular, so much so that the company has previously launched two different variations on standalone communication apps, Direct and Threads. (The latter was decommissioned in 2021.) While Instagram's attempt to separate messaging as a separate experience failed, messaging remains a key draw for the main app. For Instagram's most active users, not responding to DMs is on par with ignoring text messages — it's considered impolite, even though some teens admit that the expectation to be constantly available can be stressful.
Instagram users can use Quiet Mode to take a break — to study, sleep, or otherwise disengage. For those who remember the AIM and ICQ eras, it's the Instagram equivalent of turning off your instant messaging light. When you exit Quiet Mode, the app will provide a summary of what you missed during your break to assist you in catching up.
Teens will be prompted to enable the feature if they spend a "specific" amount of time on Instagram at night, according to Instagram, but Quiet Mode will be available to all users. (Instagram says the prompt will be triggered after a "short" period of time, but doesn't specify how short.)
Quiet Mode is currently available to users in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with Instagram hoping to expand it to more countries soon.
While Quiet Mode was the highlight of today's news, Instagram is also releasing a number of updates.
When using Instagram's built-in parental control tools, parents can now see which accounts their teen has blocked. This may make it easier for parents to have discussions with their teenagers about the change, if necessary.
Instagram is also giving users more control over what appears on the app's Explore page. This is something that is algorithmically driven by user behaviour, but it does not always reflect what the user would like to see.
In fact, just the other day, there was a viral thread on Twitter about this topic, which was related to a complaint about too much adult-oriented content appearing on some people's Instagram Explore tab (referred to in the thread as the "Discover" tab). This tab, as many people mentioned in the comments, is driven by an algorithm that shows you what you might like based on your app usage. That means you'll only see "adult" content if you view and interact with it, which means those who complained were "telling on themselves," according to the original poster.Users agreed that other people's Explore tabs could contain kittens, art, tattoos, cooking, fashion, and other innocuous content. (If you've ever been curious about the variety, the thread also provided a fascinating glimpse into what people's Explore pages look like.)
Instagram says that in the future, users will be able to hide multiple pieces of unwanted content from Explore at the same time, which may benefit those whose pages resemble their behaviour but not their actual interests. Furthermore, if you select "Not Interested" on a post in Explore, Instagram will try to avoid showing you the same type of content in the app's recommendations — such as Reels, Search, and others — in the future.
Blocked words will drive a final tweak to user recommendations.
This appears to be an attempt to address the issue where searches for "workout tips" or "healthy recipes" frequently lead users to content associated with extreme dieting and eating disorders. This was the subject of a Congressional hearing in 2021 on the harms to teen mental health caused by apps like Facebook and Instagram. Because US lawmakers have yet to take meaningful action on the issue, Meta is once again attempting to regulate itself by putting the controls in the hands of the end user, rather than holding itself accountable for algorithmic failures.
While Quiet Mode is only available in a few markets, the other updates are now available on iOS and Android worldwide, according to Instagram.
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