Meta wants to better protect children on WhatsApp with limited accounts.

As social media platforms face increasing pressure regarding the protection of minors online, tech giants are making numerous announcements to better regulate their use.

Indeed, Meta has announced the arrival of supervised accounts for children under 13 on WhatsApp, with the aim of allowing families to communicate with their children on the platform… while limiting the risks associated with unsupervised use.

Limited and Parentally Controlled Accounts

Limited accounts are coming to WhatsApp – Source: Meta

With this new feature, children will be able to use WhatsApp, but in a severely restricted version, as the accounts in question will only provide access to messaging and voice calls.

As explained in the WhatsApp press release, to create this specific profile, a parent or legal guardian will have to link the child's smartphone to their own device. Once the setup is complete, the adult will be able to control several settings such as which contacts are allowed to send messages, which groups the child can join, and requests from unknown numbers.

By default, only saved contacts will be able to communicate with the minor, and any attempt to communicate from an unsaved number will be placed in a requests folder, accessible only via a parental PIN. For their part, parents will also receive notifications when the child adds or blocks a contact, or reports a user.

Finally, certain features will also be disabled for these accounts, such as statuses, public channels, and the Meta AI conversational assistant.

A gradual rollout…

As with all WhatsApp conversations, messages exchanged with these accounts will remain protected by end-to-end encryption. This means that neither the company nor the parents will have access to the content of the discussions. Furthermore, the rollout of this new feature will begin with a testing phase with a limited number of users, before a gradual expansion in the coming months. Therefore, the precise date of its arrival in France has not yet been announced. Meanwhile, the political debate surrounding minors' access to social media is intensifying worldwide. In France, a bill aimed at prohibiting access to social media for those under 15 has been adopted by parliament, following a similar ban in Australia. With this type of system, private messaging services like WhatsApp could circumvent these restrictions, which explains the strategic interest in these new supervised accounts.