Instagram is introducing Teen Accounts, automatically enrolling young users in an app experience with built-in protections. The company announced that starting Tuesday, it will place all current and future accounts held by teens under Teen Accounts. Instagram is also rolling out a new update to its Parental Supervisor feature that lets parents monitor their children's activity on the social network.
The changes come nine months after Instagram, along with other popular social networks, came under scrutiny from lawmakers for not doing enough to protect young users on the platform.
Teens on Instagram already have some protections by default, but they have the option to opt out of them if they don't have a supervised account. Going forward, if you're under 16, you'll need parental permission to opt out, even if you don't have a supervised account.
The changes are aimed at addressing concerns that Instagram's teen protections are merely a window into the safety requirements that lawmakers and regulators have proposed.
The new built-in protections limit who can contact teens on the app and restrict the type of content account holders can see, and teens must set up parental monitoring and ask for permission to request changes.
Image credit: Instagram
On teen accounts, teens must choose whether to accept new followers, and can only receive messages from people they follow or are already connected to. (Meta told TechCrunch that Instagram considers a teen connected to someone if they're friends with them on another Meta platform, like Facebook or Messenger, or if they've accepted a chat DM request in the past but haven't followed them back.)
Teens can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow, and the app also automatically filters out offensive words and phrases from teens' direct messages and comments on their posts.
Additionally, the app will restrict some sensitive content from being shown to teens on its Explore page and in Reels — for example, content showing people fighting or advertising cosmetic surgery will not appear on the app.
To address screen time concerns, teens will be notified to close the app after one hour of use each day, and Instagram will automatically enable sleep mode from 10 pm to 7 am each day to mute notifications overnight. During this time, the app will send auto-replies to any direct messages (DMs) received.
Parents could set custom daily limits and break times for their teens on the app, but sleep mode now applies to all kids on the app, regardless of whether a parent set their own limits. Previously, Instagram only prompted kids who were using the app at night to close it.
This is a major step toward addressing mental health concerns related to social media that have been raised by the U.S. Surgeon General and various states, some of which have gone so far as to restrict teens' use of social media without parental consent.
Teens under 16 need parental permission to even change the default settings that come with a teen account. If parents want more control over their older teen's experience, they can set up parental supervision.
Image credit: Instagram
As part of the Teen account rollout, younger users will have access to a new feature that lets them choose the topics they want to see more of on the Explore page and in recommendations. Topics include soccer, crafts, dance, music and audio, cats, food and drink, and computer science. Instagram says this will help focus on more positive content.
Instagram said parents will be able to see the topics their children choose to view content on, and of course, the algorithm may still steer Instagram users to topics other than the one they selected if the app detects a topic it feels would be more interesting to teenagers.
The parental control updates will allow parents and guardians to see who their children have messaged with over the past week. While they won't be able to read the actual messages, they will be able to understand who their children have been interacting with, even if they don't have physical access to their child's device. This way, parents can voice concerns to their children if they notice them interacting with unknown or questionable accounts.
Parents can also decide how many hours a day their child can use the app – once a child reaches that limit, they will no longer be able to access the app. Parents can also completely block their child from using the app at night, instead of relying solely on sleep mode to mute notifications.
Teens who sign up for Instagram will be placed into a teen account starting today.
Instagram plans to transition all other teens in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia to teen accounts within 60 days. Instagram plans to roll out the transition to teens in the European Union later this year, and teens globally in January.
Of course, some teens lie about their age when signing up for social media platforms, which is why Meta is adding new ways for teens to verify their age. For example, if a teen tries to create a new account on their coming of age birthday, they will be required to upload an ID or take a selfie video to verify their age.
Instagram is stepping up efforts to find accounts of teenagers who enter fake coming-of-age dates and register them as teen accounts, and one of the ways the social network finds these accounts is by detecting happy birthday posts and getting reported by other users.
Teen Accounts will be rolled out to other Meta platforms later this year.