Instagram launches teen accounts with built in safety features

Instagram is rolling out Teen Accounts, designed to prioritise safety and provide parents with more control over their teen’s social media activities. The platform, will automatically place teens under 18 into these accounts, offering protections that limit who can contact them and what content they can view. This move aims to address growing concerns about teen safety on social media and empower parents to oversee their teen’s online experience. Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg took to Threads to announce the same.

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Teens under 16 will require parental permission to change any settings to be less strict. This ensures that parents have control over their teen’s experience on the platform.

Key features of Teen accounts:

• Private accounts: With default private accounts, teens need to accept new followers and people who don’t follow them can’t see their content or interact with them. This applies to all teens under 16 (including those already on Instagram and those signing up) and teens under 18 when they sign up for the app.

• Messaging restrictions: Teens will be placed in the strictest messaging settings, so they can only be messaged by people they follow or are already connected to. 
• Sensitive content restrictions: Teens will automatically be placed into the most restrictive setting of the platform's sensitive content control, which limits the type of sensitive content (such as content that shows people fighting or promotes cosmetic procedures) teens see in places like Explore and Reels. 
• Limited interactions: Teens can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow. The platform will automatically turn on the most restrictive version of it's anti-bullying feature, Hidden Words, so that offensive words and phrases will be filtered out of teens’ comments and DM requests. 
• Time limit reminders: Teens will get notifications telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day. 
• Sleep mode enabled: Sleep mode will be turned on between 10 PM and 7 AM, which will mute notifications overnight and send auto replies to DMs. 

Parental Oversight

Parents can monitor who their teens have messaged over the past seven days (without accessing the actual messages).They can set daily time limits or block access to Instagram during specific time periods.

Parents can also view topics their teens are exploring to ensure content aligns with age-appropriate interests. Instagram is implementing technology to detect teens who falsely claim to be adults and ensure they are placed in Teen Accounts with the proper restrictions.

Meta,said in its official blog, "We plan to place teens into Teen Accounts within 60 days in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, and to start placing them in Teen Accounts in the European Union later this year. Teens around the world will start to get Teen Accounts in January. We’ll also bring Teen Accounts to other Meta platforms next year. These are big updates that will change the Instagram experience for millions of teens, and we need to make sure they work correctly."

Instagram Teen Accounts are part of a larger strategy to reimagine Meta platforms with improved safety measures for teens across its apps, coming next year.