Just recently, Facebook announced that it was taking steps to make Instagram safer for young people. This includes a new Parents Guide in the US with info for parents on safety tools and privacy settings. As well as restricting direct messages to prevent unwanted contact from unknown adults

Now the company may well be work on an app for under 13s as well. According to an internal post obtained by BuzzFeed, Instagram executives are considering a version of Instagram built specifically for young children. 

According to Buzzfeed, Vishal Shah, Instagram's VP of product wrote a post which said the following:

"I’m excited to announce that going forward, we have identified youth work as a priority for Instagram and have added it to our H1 priority list,” Vishal Shah, Instagram’s vice president of product, wrote on an employee message board on Thursday. “We will be building a new youth pillar within the Community Product Group to focus on two things: (a) accelerating our integrity and privacy work to ensure the safest possible experience for teens and (b) building a version of Instagram that allows people under the age of 13 to safely use Instagram for the first time."

As you might already know, Instagram's current privacy policy denies use for kids under the age of 13. Facebook is aware that that's not stopping kids from gaming the system and signing up anyway. So the solution is to create a version of the app specifically for children and offer transparency and parent control. 

This clearly needs to be done carefully though and Facebook is aware of that. Just a couple of years ago the NSPCC released a report showing a 200 per cent rise in recorded instances in the use of Instagram to target and abuse children in the UK alone. So the safety of our children online is still a growing concern.