After a whistleblower alleges the company's inaction on harmful effects, Instagram will ask teens and children to 'take a break' from the app.

Instagram has had a rough week, which began with a catastrophic server outage that affected the whole Facebook group — dubbed one of the largest app outages in recent history. In addition to the downtime, an ex-employee of the company, Frances Haugen, accused the corporation of being inattentive to a number of major difficulties.

Now, during a CNN State of the Union event in the United States, Facebook's VP of global affairs, Nick Clegg, has stated that the business is working to combat use addiction and exposure to hazardous content among children and teenagers on Instagram.

"We're going to introduce something that I think will make a significant difference," Clegg reportedly said at the event, "where our systems see a teenager looking at the same content over and over again, and it's content that may not be conducive to their well-being, we'll nudge them to look at other content."

The prodding will ostensibly take the form of prompts encouraging underage users to visit other posts and accounts in order to help them deal with issues such as being obsessed or addicted to certain types of content.

In addition, Clegg stated that Instagram will reportedly provide a 'Take a break' function. If kids and teens use the app for more than a certain amount of hours, the latter will suggest that they take a break from it. Clegg's allegations follow Haugen's testimony before the US Senate, in which he said that Facebook did not take studies on the impact of its services on users' mental health seriously enough, and that it prioritises economic gain over the well-being of its communities.

It's unclear whether Facebook's actions are in response to Haugen or have been planned for some time. It appears to be the former, as despite discussing these procedures, Clegg did not provide an estimated date for when these functionalities will be available to users.

This indicates that the company's plans are still in the early stages, and that the feature's actual implementation will take some time. Facebook is also reportedly working to delay the launch of Instagram Kids and provide parents with more tools to monitor their children's activities across the company's many platforms.