Meta Announces Screen Smart Series for Parents in the US

Meta’s running a new series of workshops across the U.S. which are designed to better equip parents in managing their child’s screen time, while also highlighting the potential risks of online exposure, and how to minimize such, where possible.

Meta’s Screen Smart series will see in-person events hosted in five U.S. cities, with Meta experts on hand to provide workshops, presentations, and more.

As per Meta:

“The series will start this week in Denver, followed by Charleston, Houston, Boston and Los Angeles. At each event we’ll provide 1:1 hands-on educational workshops for parents and help them understand the best ways to use our supervision features. Attendees will also hear from academics and clinicians on ways to support their teens’ experiences online and learn more from Meta about solutions that would help empower parents.”  

The events are the latest in Meta’s evolving efforts to protect teens, which also include an evolving range of in-app measures and tools, active by default for teen users, that seek to limit potential harm and exposure in its apps.

In the first three months of this year alone, Meta’s implemented new alerts to combat sextortion scams, added processes to limit exposure to self-harm related content, and updated its pop-ups to highlight potential impersonation and scam links.

These add to the many other measures Meta has added over time, including its Family Center, which provides a means for parents to keep tabs on their kids’ usage of its apps.

None of these options, however, is foolproof, and in most cases, kids can switch out of these settings and tools if they choose. Parents may be able to enforce such, but in order to do that, they also need to be aware of how the systems and tools work, and kids, a lot of the time, are much more literate in such systems.

Which is why these workshops are important, not only for highlighting the dangers, but also, to ensure that parents are aware of the various tools that they have at their disposal, and how to ensure their children are using each.

It’s a good initiative, which expands on the initial Screen Smart series that Meta hosted in select U.S. cities last year.

More info is always better, and if you’re in one of these cities, it could be worth heading along to hear from Meta’s experts.

You can read more about Meta’s Screen Smart series here.