Instagram Adds New ‘Quiet Mode’ to Help Users Take Breaks and TikTok’s Ban on College Campuses

According to Social Media Today, Instagram’s adding more ways for users to control their in-app experience, with new tools that better enable you to take a break from the app, and options to manage what you’re shown in content recommendations. Enter Quiet Mode.

Quiet Mode will automatically switch off all notifications from the app. Additionally, once you enable Quiet Mode to your profile status, users will receive an auto-responder via DM. According to Instagram, “Teens have told us that they sometimes want to take time for themselves and might be looking for more ways to focus at night, while studying, and during school. You can easily customize your ‘Quiet mode’ hours to fit your schedule and once the feature is turned off, we’ll show you a quick summary of notifications so you can catch up on what you missed.”

Additionally, Instagram has also launched a new self-moderation tool, which will allow users to hide recommended posts in the app based on keywords. Users will be able to prevent the app from showing certain content in their newsfeed by selecting ‘Don’t suggest posts with certain words’ options.

In other news…

According to Mashable, “a host of schools in the U.S. have announced that TikTok is banned from government-issued devices and, more recently, schools are also restricting access to the platform on their WiFi and internet network.” This campus ban comes as more than 30 states and Congress has issued bans on government-issues devices. It has been reported that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, harvest data from users’ devices and offers that to the Chinese government.