Today, Instagram announced a significant expansion of its selection of time management tools with the quiet mode feature. It does this by silencing any incoming notifications, auto-responding to your Direct Messages, and even change your status to 'In Quiet Mode' so everyone knows you're not in the app at the present time. The company said it will prompt teen users to enable the feature if they're using the app late at night.
Among the changes going live today are the expansion of parental control tools and other tools for recommendations management.

The launches come as Instagram is working to make its app less of a target for regulators and lawmakers who have been concerned with social media's potential harms, particularly for teen users. So far, Instagram has rolled out many teen safety features, including protecting teens' privacy, reducing unwanted adult contact, limiting ad targeting, and restricting teens' access to mature content, among other things to help parents monitor and manage their teens' Instagram use through parental controls.

Quiet Mode is added to a few other tools the company offers to help control screen time, such as daily time spent controls, which allow people to see how much they're using the app and set alerts for themselves, as well as controls to set up "take a break" reminders after an individual session of an app lasts for a certain amount of time, and many features that allow users to pause, snooze, and unfollow pages, groups, and people in an effort to reduce further engagement with potentially addictive or unwanted content.

But Quiet Mode is different, in that it doesn't just propose a feature that forces you to step away. Instead, it's about real-world effects of trying to step away from an app that you normally use to which others would expect you to be readily available.

For young people, at least, Instagram is the most popular messaging app-it's so popular that even years ago, the company came out with two completely different takes on standalone communications apps, Direct and Threads. (The latter it discontinued in 2021.) Breaking out messaging into its own separate experience, of course, didn't pan out for Instagram; messaging remains a major pull for the main app. For Instagram's heavy users, that means never reading text messages ranks right there with failing to reply to DMs  – and it's now even kind of rude, although teens admit finding this constant expectation sometimes stressful.

Quiet Mode lets you take a break from Instagram to study, sleep, or otherwise step away. It's the Instagram version of turning your instant messaging light off for those who remember the old AIM and ICQ days. The app will also summarize what you missed while you were away when you exit Quiet Mode.

Teens will be prompted to enable the feature when they spend a "specific" amount of time on Instagram at night, but Quiet Mode will be available to all users. (Instagram says the prompt will be triggered after a "short" amount of time, but did not provide details on what it considers short.)

The app will be introduced to users residing in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in Quiet Mode, said Instagram. It would shortly be made available to users in more countries, it added.
Quiet Mode wasn't the only news today, however.

One is the newly added ability for parents to see the accounts their teen has blocked, when using Instagram's built-in parental control tools. This could make it easier for parents to have discussions with their teens so they can talk about the change, if need be.

It also allows for more control of what people see on the Explore page of the Instagram app through algorithms based on user behavior, though this doesn't always reflect what a person would like to see.

To point out, there was quite a viral thread on the topic on Twitter the other day, about a grievance that too much adult-oriented content was showing up in some people's Instagram explore tab (known in that thread as the "discover" tab.). As the many people pointed out to the replies, this particular tab is driven by a discovery algorithm that shows one the things they might like as per their app usage. This means you only see "adult" content if that's what you view and interact with-meaning those complaining were just "telling on themselves," the original poster wrote. Other people's Explore tabs may be filled with kittens or art or tattoos or cooking or fashion, and other innocuous content, users agreed. (The thread also gives a great glimpse into what people's Explore pages look like, if you've ever been curious about the variety.)

Going forward, says Instagram, users will be able to hide several pieces of unwanted content at once from Explore, potentially helping those whose pages appear to resemble their behavior and not their actual interests. Tapping "Not Interested" on a post in Explore will also cause Instagram to try to avoid showing that same type of content within the app's recommendations beyond that, including Reels, Search, and much more.

It's going to be led by blocked words that have a final nudge from users' recommendations.

If you have already configured Instagram to hide comments and DMs with specific words, emojis or hashtags, that block will apply equally across the app on recommended posts. That is if you block a word, say "fitness" or "recipes," explains the company, it would mean not showing you content in which those words feature within the caption or the hashtag.

This seems to be an attempt to address the problem wherein searches for things like "workout tips" or "healthy recipes" can easily lead users to content associated with extreme dieting and eating disorders. The topic had been the subject of a 2021 Congressional hearing about the harms to teen mental health that comes from using apps like Facebook and Instagram. Since U.S. politicians haven't yet moved strongly in this area, Meta tries to regulate itself here through controls that place power entirely in the hands of the end user rather than keeping accountability with algorithm failures themselves.
Quiet Mode is initially releasing only in select markets. Other updates, though are releasing worldwide for both iOS and Android, the Instagram platform said.