Technology company Meta yesterday announced new features to help teenagers and families make it easier to manage the time they spend on Instagram and Facebook, including parental supervision tools and alerts.

"These new features on Instagram and Facebook come after the success of recent launches such as Take a Break, Parental Supervision Tools on Instagram and Silent Mode, which were launched earlier this year," the technology company said in a statement.

For now, the new features, which will be available in a few weeks, include "new parental supervision tools on Instagram", where parents can see how many friends their teenager has in common with their followers and the accounts they follow, and "new alerts to help teenagers manage their time on Facebook and Instagram".

So this includes "a notification if they spend more than 20 minutes on Facebook, encouraging them to take a break from the app and set daily limits" and "an alert on Instagram that suggests they turn off the app if they're watching 'reels' in a row in the evening".

Another feature is silent mode, "which is designed to help teens focus and set healthy boundaries with friends and followers" and which "will become available globally in the coming weeks, after initially being launched in a few countries at the beginning of the year".

It also adds "new restrictions to protect people from unwanted direct message requests".

From now on, "you'll only be able to send a direct message request to someone you don't follow - and you'll only be able to send other message requests once the user has accepted the request to chat," the statement reads.

"These message requests will be limited to text only, which means that people will only be able to send images and videos to someone who doesn't follow them after the recipient accepts the request to chat," which means that people will no longer receive unsolicited images or videos from people they don't follow.