Meta has rolled out parental supervision on Threads in India as part of its wider Asia-Pacific expansion, giving parents and guardians greater control over teenagers’ use of the platform.
Through Family Center, parents can check daily usage, set time limits, adjust Sleep Mode, manage tagging and control certain privacy and sensitive-content settings.
What Parents Can Control
For teens under 16, parents can also decide whether some built-in safety settings can be made less restrictive. Sleep Mode can limit overnight access, with notifications muted and auto-replies enabled by default between 10 pm and 7 am.
The rollout comes as Meta faces wider scrutiny in India over content moderation, recommendation algorithms, deepfakes, human review and intermediary safe-harbour protections.
The government has also sought stronger intervention and local-language moderation, while Meta has agreed to report child-safety matters directly to India’s cybercrime authorities through the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), according to the reports.
The wider regulatory framework includes obligations under India’s intermediary rules and POCSO, while the Digital Personal Data Protection framework requires verifiable parental consent for processing children’s data and places restrictions on targeted advertising and profiling.
Meta is also facing child-safety scrutiny in the US, where it agreed to a $17 million settlement with 47 states over allegations concerning its platform design and young users.
The new Threads controls add parental oversight, but do not by themselves address questions around detecting and preventing illegal content or recommendation systems.
