Millions of Teens Will See Restrictions on Their Instagram Account After Meta Announces Major Changes
Families and legislators have been putting pressure on Instagram and other social media platforms to make the internet safer for teens, and their efforts have finally come to (at least some) fruition. Instagram and their parent company, Meta, just announced the launch of “Teen Accounts” which will be implemented for all Instagram users (new and currently active) under 18.
Over the next couple of months, all teen accounts will be switched to private, their messaging will be restricted, a “bedtime” of sorts will be enforced, and the company will be doing more to make sure t(w)eens are seeing appropriate, enjoyable content.
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“They’re an automatic set of protections for teens that try to proactively address the top concerns that we’ve heard from parents about teens online,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today on Good Morning America.
By default, all teen users will have private accounts, meaning they will need to accept new followers, and only followers will be able to interact with them and see their posts.
“This helps prevent unwanted contact from people, they don’t know and don’t want to hear from,” Naomi Gleit, head of product at Meta said at an event announcing the launch of Teen Accounts. “And in practice, tens of millions of teens currently in public accounts will be moved to private accounts. So this is a really big thing.”
Gleit said there will also be “the strictest messaging settings,” so teens can’t receive unsolicited messages from unknown people. Based on the chosen parental controls (more on that soon!), parents can also see who their kids are messaging — although they can’t read the messages. Plus, an anti-bullying feature will be activated to filter out offensive words from comments and messages.
A big concern with teens (hell — people of all ages!) is how often they are on their phones, so there’s also a new feature to limit screen time. Teen Accounts will automatically go into “sleep mode” between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. so kids can’t be scrolling into the wee hours of the night.
Plus, Gleit said teens will get “daily minute reminders” after every hour of usage on Instagram, noting, “We designed these notifications to encourage teens to leave the app or consider if their time on Instagram is being well spent.”
Teens will be limited to seeing age-appropriate topics (no nudity, drug use, bullying, etc.). On the flip side, teens can select topics they are interested in to curate their Explore feed. Parents will be able to see what topics (music, art, sports, etc.) their teen chose via the parental supervision features, which Gleit hopes sparks conversations between parents and their kids.
Any teen younger than 16 who wants to change the new settings will need a parent’s permission via Instagram to do so.
“Your teen could ask for your permission to switch from a private account to a public account,” Gleit said. “And to get permission, teens will need to set up parental supervision on Instagram. I really like this design because it creates an incentive for your teens to involve you as their parent, in their Instagram experience.”
You might be (understandably) thinking, “Well, but teens are crafty — can’t they get around this?”
If a teen attempts to change their birthday or create a new account with an adult birthday, Instagram will ask them to verify their age with an ID, Gleit said. And if they’ve already signed up with a false birthday, Meta is working out the kinks there.
“We are developing a technology to help find those teams and put them in Teen Accounts,” Gleit continued. “So we are looking at signals like who they interact with or what content they’re engaging with to try to predict whether someone is an adult or a teen.
“This really is a big step for us and for the industry and we will definitely make mistakes along the way, but we will continue to try to improve the accuracy of these models,” she added.
Teen Accounts go into effect immediately for new users. Existing teen users in the U.S. will automatically see their Teen Account changes within 60 days.
“The biggest input into the creation of this has really been our conversation with parents,” Gleit told SheKnows exclusively. “We are really focused on listening to parents because, at the end of the day, they know their teen the best.
“At the same time, we don’t want to put all the responsibility on parents,” she continued. “That’s why all of these settings are applied automatically.”
The creation of Teen Accounts comes after an advisory from U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy outlined the harm of social media on t(w)eens’ mental health and after the American Psychological Association recommended new guidelines on social media use for kids. Dozens of states are even suing Meta, alleging the company — which also owns Facebook — is knowingly harming young users’ mental health with their “addictive” platforms.
In June, Dr. Murthy wrote an op-ed for The New York Times saying social media sites should be “required” to have a warning label — like those used for tobacco products — that says the sites are “associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents” and would “regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe.”
For more information about Teen Accounts, parents, caregivers, and teens can visit instagram.com/teenaccounts.
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