Instagram is making teens’ accounts private by default in a bid to make the platform safer for children, amid growing backlash over how social media affects young people’s lives.
Starting Tuesday, anyone under 18 who signs up for Instagram in the US, UK, Canada and Australia will be placed into restrictive teen accounts, and those who already have accounts will be migrated over the next 60 days. Teens in the European Union will see their accounts adjusted later this year.
Meta acknowledges that teens may lie about their age and says they will need to verify their age more often, such as if they try to create a new account with an adult birthday. The Menlo Park, Calif., company also said it is developing technology that proactively detects teen accounts that pretend to be adults and automatically places them in restricted teen accounts.
Teen accounts will be private by default. Direct messages are limited so teens can only receive them from people they follow or are already connected to. “Sensitive content,” like videos of people fighting or promoting cosmetic procedures, will be limited, Meta said. Teens will also receive notifications if they are on Instagram for more than 60 minutes, and a “sleep mode” will be enabled to silence notifications and send automatic replies to direct messages from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.
These settings will be enabled for all teens, but 16 and 17 year olds will be able to turn them off. Children under 16 will need their parents’ permission to do so.
“The three concerns we hear from parents are that their teens are seeing content they don’t want to see, that they’re being contacted by people who don’t want to be contacted, or that they’re spending too much money on the app,” said Naomi Gleit, Meta’s chief product officer. “So Teen Accounts are meant to address all three of those concerns.”
The announcement comes as the company faces lawsuits from dozens of U.S. states accusing it of harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addicted children to its platforms.
In the past, Meta’s efforts to improve teen safety and mental health on its platforms have been met with criticism that the changes don’t go far enough. For example, while kids will receive a notification when they’ve spent 60 minutes on the app, they’ll be able to bypass it and keep scrolling.
Unless the child’s parents enable “parental monitoring” mode, which allows them to limit their teen’s time on Instagram to a specific amount of time, such as 15 minutes.
With the latest changes, Meta is giving parents more options to monitor their children’s accounts. Children under 16 will need permission from a parent or guardian to change their settings to make them less restrictive. They can do this by setting up “parental supervision” on their accounts and connecting them to a parent or guardian.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global business, said last week that parents were not using the parental controls the company has introduced in recent years.
Gleit said she believed the teen accounts would create “a strong incentive for parents and teens to put in place parental supervision.”
“Parents will be able to see, through the family hub, who is messaging their teen and hopefully have a conversation with them,” she said. “If there is bullying or harassment, parents will have visibility into who their teen is following, who is following their teen, and who their teen has messaged in the last seven days. They will hopefully be able to have some of those conversations and help them navigate these really difficult situations online.”
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said last year that tech companies were putting too much responsibility on parents when it comes to protecting their children on social media.
“We’re asking parents to manage a technology that’s rapidly evolving and fundamentally changing the way their kids think about themselves, the way they build friendships, the way they perceive the world — and technology, by the way, that previous generations never had to deal with,” Murthy said in May 2023.
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