Photo: Meta.
Meta has announced the introduction of Teen Accounts for Instagram, as it tries to make the platform safer for children. This is the first of such moves that Meta says it plans to roll out to its other platforms next year.
Beginning today in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, when anyone under the age of 18 signs up for an Instagram account, they will be placed under a Teen Account. Meta says that those with existing accounts will see their accounts migrated over the next 60 days. Teens in Europe will see their accounts impacted by this, in January next year.
Photo: Meta.
Teen Accounts have built-in protections which limit who can contact them and the content they see, and also provide new ways for teens to explore their interests. Teenaged members of Instagram teens under 16 will automatically have their accounts placed into a Teen Account and will need a parent’s permission to change any of these settings to be less strict.
To get permission, teens will need to set up parental supervision on Instagram. This also works if parents want more oversight over their older teen’s (16+) experiences, they simply have to turn on parental supervision. Then, they can approve any changes to these settings, irrespective of their teen’s age.
Photo: Meta.
According to Meta, the new Teen Account protections are designed to address parents’ biggest concerns, including who their teens are talking to online, the content they’re seeing and whether their time is being well spent. These include:
- Private accounts: With default private accounts, teens need to accept new followers and people who don’t follow them can’t see their content or interact with them. This applies to all teens under 16 (including those already on Instagram and those signing up) and teens under 18 when they sign up for the app.
- Messaging restrictions: Teens will be placed in the strictest messaging settings, so they can only be messaged by people they follow or are already connected to.
- Sensitive content restrictions: Teens will automatically be placed into the most restrictive setting of our sensitive content control, which limits the type of sensitive content (such as content that shows people fighting or promotes cosmetic procedures) teens see in places like Explore and Reels.
- Limited interactions: Teens can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow. We’ll also automatically turn on the most restrictive version of our anti-bullying feature, Hidden Words, so that offensive words and phrases will be filtered out of teens’ comments and DM requests.
- Time limit reminders: Teens will get notifications telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day.
- Sleep mode enabled: Sleep mode will be turned on between 10 PM and 7 AM, which will mute notifications overnight and send auto-replies to DMs.
Photo: Meta.
Meta acknowledged that teens may lie about their ages to get around such restrictions so it is requiring age verification in more places, as well as building technology to proactively find accounts belonging to teens, even if the account lists an adult birthday.
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