After years of scrutiny over its approach to handling teen safety on its platform, Meta is rolling out a new type of account that will soon be required for all teens under the age of 16 on Instagram. The new “teen accounts” include more parental supervision tools and automatically opt teens into stricter privacy settings that can only be adjusted with parental approval.
These changes are unlikely to satisfy Meta’s harshest critics, who have argued that the company prioritizes its profits over the safety and well-being of teens. But these changes will be significant for the app’s younger users, who will face new restrictions on how they can use the app.
With teen accounts, kids under the age of 16 will automatically be opted into Instagram’s strictest privacy settings. Many of these settings, such as automatically private accounts, the inability to message strangers, and limiting “sensitive content,” are already in place for teens on Instagram. But younger teens will now be unable to change these settings without parental approval.
And, once a parent sets up Instagram’s in-app supervision tools, they’ll be able to see which accounts their kids are exchanging messages with (though parents won’t be able to see the content of those DMs) as well as what kind of topics their kids are seeing in their feed. Parents will also have the ability to limit the time their kids spend in the app by setting a “sleep mode” — which will mute notifications or make the app completely inaccessible — or reminders to take breaks.
According to Meta, these changes are intended to “give parents better oversight of their teens’ experiences.” Although the company has had some parental supervision features in place since 2022, these features were optional and required teens to opt-in to the controls. Teen accounts, on the other hand, will be mandatory for all teens under 16 and more restrictive settings, such as the ability to make an account public, won’t be able to be adjusted without parental approval.
The company says it also has plans to find teens who have lied about their age when creating their Instagram account. Starting next year, the company will use AI to detect signs that an account may belong to a teen, such as the age of other linked accounts and the age of accounts they frequently interact with, to spot young users who may be trying to circumvent its new restrictions. The app will then ask users to verify their age.
Meanwhile, Meta will start designating new accounts created by 13- to 15-year-olds as “teen accounts” starting today. The company will begin converting existing teens to Meta accounts in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia in the next two months, while it plans to roll it out more broadly in the EU “later this year.” Teen accounts will be available in other countries and on Meta’s other apps starting in 2025.