The parent company of Facebook and Instagram has added new features on their Instagram platform to help parents and their teenagers on the app.

Mums and dads can now set time limits, monitor follower lists and notifications on inappropriate behaviour on Instagram.

Safe on Social, an organisation dedicated to educating schools and students about cyberbullying and online exploitation, said the new strategy was a positive step but time was needed before assessing its effectiveness.

Founder and CEO Kirra Pendergast said to implement the parental controls, a joint agreement was required between parents and their kids.

“Personally, having spoken to 800,000 teens over the last 10 years or so, I find that concept kind of, um, delusional, to be honest,” she told Liam Bartlett on 6PR Mornings.

“I think there will be a quick workaround by teens, like the four other accounts that they’ll be using that mum and dad don’t know about.”

Pendergast said mums and dads don’t really know what happens on their kids’ social media accounts.

“A lot of parents think they know a lot because they use the apps themselves, but they’re not the target audience here,” she said.

“The levels of what we call sextortion and things that are happening through direct message requests on Instagram would blow your mind.

“And parents don’t see it because their kids aren’t speaking up because they’ve been taught in the past they’ll get in a load of trouble if they receive these kinds of images from people, or they’re too scared to speak up because mum and dad will ban them from their devices if they’ve done something wrong.

“And they assume that they are going to be banned, so they just don’t tell them, where we need to be flipping the narrative on that and making sure they feel comfortable about speaking about anything that happens online.”

Tap PLAY to hear more insights from Kirra Pendergast on social media monitoring