Instagram is launching separate accounts for teens under 18, in a bid to make the platform safer for children as social media is often criticized for its influence on young people’s lives.
Starting Tuesday in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, anyone under 18 who signs up for Instagram will be categorized as a “Teen” account, with existing accounts moving to that category 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 it will ask them to verify their age in more cases, 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 the restricted teen accounts.
Teen accounts will be private by default. Private messages will be restricted so that teens can only receive messages from people they follow or are already connected to. “Sensitive content,” such as videos of people fighting or those promoting cosmetic procedures, will be restricted, Meta said.
Teens will also receive notifications if they are on Instagram for more than 60 minutes. A “sleep mode” will also be installed to turn off notifications and send automatic replies to direct messages from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.
While these settings are enabled for all teens, 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 or that they’re being contacted by people they don’t want to contact or that they’re spending too much money on the app,” said Naomi Gleit, Meta’s chief product officer. “So the teen accounts are really focused on addressing those three 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 addict young people 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 didn’t go far enough.
Responsibility to parents
For example, while kids will receive a notification when they’ve spent 60 minutes on the app, they can bypass it and continue scrolling. That’s unless the child’s parents enable “parental monitoring” mode, which allows parents to limit teens’ time on Instagram to a specific amount of time, such as 15 minutes.
With these new changes, Meta is giving parents more options to monitor their children’s accounts. Children under the age of 16 will need permission from a parent or guardian to change their settings to less restrictive ones. They can do this by setting up “parental monitoring” on their accounts and connecting them to a parent or guardian.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global business, said last week that parents aren’t using the parental controls the company has introduced in recent years.
He believes teen accounts will create a “strong incentive for parents and teens to put in place parental supervision.”
“Parents will be able to see, through the family center, who is messaging their teenager and hopefully have a conversation with them,” he said.
“If there’s bullying or harassment, parents will be able to see what accounts their teen is following, who their teen is following, who their teen has messaged in the last seven days and hopefully have some of those conversations and help them navigate those really difficult situations online.”
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy ruled last year that tech companies were putting too much emphasis on parents when it came to protecting children on social media.
“We are asking parents to manage a technology that is rapidly evolving and fundamentally changing the way their children see themselves, the way they build friendships, the way they see the world — and technology, by the way, that previous generations never had to manage,” Murthy noted in May 2023.