Featuring TikTok’s favourite parent and teen duos, the campaign will highlight Kat Clark and her daughter Deja, Bobbi Lockyer and son Sebastian and George Ray and mum Roslyn producing video Reels for the platform. The series showcases how parents and young people can have normal conversations about social media, wellbeing and keeping safe online, and thinking twice before sharing with their online communities. 

We all know it can be daunting for young kids to talk to their parents about their online presence, and vice versa. The campaign hopes to break down these barriers when it comes to social media use. The campaigning aims to encourage conversations – hence its name, Reel Talk. It will focus on how media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok work. 

With recent data breaches across the globe, privacy is an ongoing issue, which may also spark conversations in the family on the safest measures to protect private information, particularly with children. The campaign also aims to spark conversations on how to deal with online trolls and racism, aiming to raise awareness about how damaging this can be for younger people. 

“Social media has really helped connect us as a family because I feel like that’s how young people communicate these days,” says Clark, reflecting on the use of social media in her family.

In Instagram’s press release, she goes on to highlight how she approaches her daughters on the topic of social media.

“If there is anything that I am concerned about for my daughters on social media, that’s when I have a conversation with them and talk about it. It is also super important for parents to learn how to follow and message people on social media, because they’re going to be able to pass on their knowledge to their young person to keep them safe. We’re really proud to be working with ReachOut and Instagram to help spread awareness on social media wellbeing and safety.”

Director of service at ReachOut, Jackie Hallan also addressed the importance of the campaign. 

“As the role of social media in teens’ lives has grown, so have parents and carers’ concerns about online safety. We know that parents and carers want to help their teens navigate the online world but it can be confusing and overwhelming,” she says.

Hallan outlines ways in which online safety can be improved, suggesting that “online safety is to empower young people and their parents with online safety tools and the support they need to  have conversations about social media, work together to set boundaries and connect to find solutions if something does go wrong. Reel Talk builds on the work of ReachOut Parents and Instagram via the Parents’ Guides to Instagram by showcasing real life lessons from experts – parents and teens themselves.” 

Earlier this year, Instagram launched wellbeing tools via its ‘Family Centre’, allowing parents and guardians to be able to access tools and resources from experts that help young people access safety across Meta’s platforms. 

At a random time of the day, users will get notified to capture and share photos within two minutes. It enables users to take a forward facing photo and a selfie at the same time to share what they’re doing – unfiltered.

The app is becoming one of the most popular on social media, with United States President, Joe Biden joining in the bandwagon. 

The idea around BeReal is simple, it allows users to share their unfiltered, unpolished look at themselves and their surroundings. 

What comes with popularity also comes with other apps copying. Meta quickly enforced short-form video scrolling after TikTok dominated social media. 

Managing director APAC at Sensor Tower, Tom Cui, comments on the trends explaining,“TikTok continues to be Australia’s favourite social media app. In fact, it’s now much more than just an entertainment app, rather, it is a livelihood for many Aussies, helping consumers to monetise their content and fuel the growing creator economy Down Under.”

“BeReal has taken Australia by storm, surging in popularity since its appearance on the market late last year. It’s not easy to break into the social media market and perform so well. However, we’re yet to see if the app is set to be just a fad. Global SensorTower data has shown that despite a flurry in downloads, BeReal’s daily usage is much lower than competitor apps which might suggest the novelty is wearing off,” says Cui.

Cui comments on the downfall of Instagram downloads outlining, “What’s really interesting is that Instagram app downloads are the second lowest of all the social media platforms. This suggests that the curated aesthetic is on the way out and authenticity is on the way in. Social media apps will do well to tap into this trend as consumers embrace originality over edited content.”

Blocking people has been made easy with this new feature allowing users to block someone who may have other accounts linked to them. Ultimately making it more difficult for that person to interact with the user again on Instagram.

Last year, the app tested to see if this new feature would work: its results indicated that users will be expected to block four million fewer accounts every week, as the automation feature should work seamlessly. 

Instagram has also updated its hidden words feature indicating since last year, more than one in five people with large followings on the platform have turned on the feature. This allowed users to automatically filter harmful content from their comments and message requests. 

Instagram revealed that when users turned on the feature, 40 percent fewer comments that might be offensive are not seen.

However, this feature is only benefiting users who have creator accounts at the moment as Instagram continues to carry out more testing. All users will be able to turn their settings on or off at any time and can create a list of words, phrases and emojis they want to hide.

The app is continuing to improve this feature and will introduce other features like;

• Expanding hidden words to cover story replies, so offensive replies from people you don’t follow will be sent to a hidden request folder allowing the user to not see them.
• Bringing in new languages, including Farsi, Turkish, Russian, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil.
• Instagram is filtering to spot and hide more intentional misspellings of offensive terms, for instance, if someone uses a “1” instead of an “i”.
• New terms have been introduced to filter message requests that might contain scams or spam. This is available in English, but have stated they will bring more languages and countries soon.

Remember MSN nudges? Instagram is bringing them back!

Instagram has stated they “understand there are cases where people mean well but may misjudge how their words could negatively impact others.”

The nudges feature will show up as a notification encouraging people to consider how they respond that may be offensive. 

The feature is also available in direct messages reminding people to be respectful when sending messages to a creator.