Starting today, Instagram will begin putting new and existing users under the age of 18 into “Teen Accounts” — a move that will affect how tens of millions of teens interact with the platform. The new account type automatically applies a set of protections to young users, and only users 16 years of age and older can loosen some of these settings.
For starters, the accounts of all minors on Instagram will be private by default (not just teens under 16) and will come with some of Instagram’s existing restrictions for young users, such as those that prevent strangers from direct messaging them. But other new features are coming, too, including a Sleep Mode that silences notifications from 10PM to 7AM.
“This really standardizes a lot of the work that we’ve done, simplifies it, and brings it to all teens,” Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, said during an interview with The Verge. “It provides essentially a set of protections that are in place and are already populated.”
Teens will also get to pick age-appropriate topics they can see more of in Instagram’s recommendations and on the Explore page, such as “sports,” “animal & pets,” “travel,” and more. Instagram will continue limiting the types of content teens see on Reels or on the Explore page. It will also send alerts reminding teens to take breaks from the app.
Along with these changes, Instagram is updating some of its parental controls. Parents who want to supervise their teen on the app will be able to see who their child has messaged in the past seven days (without seeing the contents of the messages). They’ll also get to see which topics their teen has chosen to view most often.
While Instagram will let teens over the age of 16 tweak these settings, younger teens will need the permission of a parent to make any changes, like making their account public. Parents will then have to set up Instagram’s supervisory tools to approve the change.
Instagram’s teen accounts are rolling out gradually to users in the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada. Teens who sign up for new accounts will see the change first, followed by existing users within about a week. Meta plans on bringing Teen Accounts to the European Union later this year and will expand the feature across its other platforms in 2025.
“We know some teens are going to try to lie about their age to get around these protections”
But even with these protections coming to all teens on Instagram, questions remain about how well Meta can apply them. “We know some teens are going to try to lie about their age to get around these protections,” Davis says. “Which is why we are going to be building up new opportunities to verify a teen’s age.” Users who attempt to change their age from under 18 to over 18 are already required to record a video selfie, upload their ID, or have other users vouch for their age, but Instagram’s new systems take things a step further.
The platform can now use AI to scan for signals that may indicate a user is under 18. For example, if a user says they’re 18 when creating an account but someone on the app tells them “Happy 14th birthday,” Instagram can use that to inform their real age. “One of the challenges for age broadly is it can be very hard to know,” Davis says. “We have to take a multi-layered approach because there’s no one foolproof way to do this.”
Since Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a trove of internal documents detailing the company’s studies on the mental health of teens in 2021, lawmakers have taken a harder stance on social platforms and their effect on kids. Instagram has rolled out a slew of child safety features over the past few years and launched parental controls in 2022 in response. The platform has even agreed to help researchers study its impact on the mental health of teens and young adults.
All of this still hasn’t put lawmakers at ease. Nearly 40 US states are backing the surgeon general’s proposal to put warning labels on social media platforms, while the Senate passed landmark online child safety legislation in July.