Instagram is launching a Teen Account, automatically enrolling young users into a different app experience within the app that embeds several safety settings. The company said it would automatically convert all existing and new accounts for teens to a teen-dedicated account, starting from Tuesday. Instagram said it would add some new tools to its parental supervision feature, allowing parents to see their child’s activity.
The changes come nine months after heavy pressure from lawmakers on Instagram and other leading social networks for not doing enough to protect young users on their platforms.
While Instagram does offer a number of default protections on the platform for teens, teens can still opt out if their accounts are not supervised. Users under the age of 16 will be asked for parental consent to continue with or without a supervised account. 
That’s done in hopes of quelling concerns that Instagram’s moves to protect teens were mostly cosmetic and didn’t actually meet safety standards lawmakers and regulators have suggested.
The new built-in protections that have gone into place will limit who can contact a teen on the app and also limit the types of content available to the account holder. Teens will have to create parental supervision, then request permission for a change.
With a Teen Account, teens have the ability to control the follower requests they receive and receive messages from only those people they follow or have a previous connection to. Meta explained to Eltrys that Instagram considers a teen to be connected to another user when the teens are friends on other Meta products, such as Facebook or Messenger, or when they have previously accepted a direct message request from that user for a chat, even if they do not follow them.
Only people they decide to follow can tag or mention teens. The inappropriate language and expressions are filtered out in the direct messages, too, as well as comments of a teenager’s posts seamlessly by the application.
Sensitive content in the app’s Explore page and reels will also be limited for teenagers. The application is designed in such a way that it filters out content showing violence and/or cosmetic procedures.
In response to screen time concerns, teens will be notified after one hour of daily use to close the app. Instagram also said it will introduce an automatic bedtime mode from 10 PM to 7 AM every day. Most simply, the new feature will automatically mute notifications at night. During this time, it will automatically respond to any DMs it gets, saying, “[User] is not available now.”.
Parents have been able to set customised daily time limits and add scheduled breaks for their teens inside the app. Now, Sleep Mode goes into effect for all teens using the app, no matter any individual limits their parents may have set. Previously, Instagram would simply remind teens to log off during nighttime hours.
The US Surgeon General and various states—some of which have moved to limit teenagers’ use of social media without parent clearance—called this a meaningful step towards quelling mental health concerns associated with social media.
Users below the age of 16 will need to obtain parental consent to change any of the default settings of the Teen Account. Parents who want to have more visibility into what their older teen is doing are free to set up parental supervision.
With the Teen Account feature, younger users will have the ability to pick specific topics they’re interested in learning more about on the Explore page and in their personalised recommendations. Topics they can select include soccer, crafts, dance, music & audio, cats, food & drink, computer science, and many other topics. Instagram adds that this is part of an effort to emphasise more positive content.
According to Instagram, parents will be able to see the topics their kid has chosen to see content about. Of course, algorithms can and will expose Instagram users to topics other than those they’ve explicitly chosen to see content about, especially if the app detects that such content is more likely to engage the user.
The new, enhanced parental controls will show parents or guardians the teenager’s messaging history from the past week. While they will not be able to see what was said, they will get a good view of who their teen has been talking to without needing to have their teenager’s device in possession. That way, parents can take up any worrying issues with their teenagers if they notice their child interacting with accounts they either don’t know or are potentially bad news.
Parents will be able to control how much time their child can spend on apps every day. Once their child has reached that limit, access to the app will no longer be available. Rather than simply relying on Sleep Mode to cut off notifications, parents can actually prevent their teenager from accessing the app during the night.
Starting today, teens that join Instagram will be defaulted into a teen account.
Instagram is going to transition all other teens into a Teen Account within 60 days throughout the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. The company will make changes for teens within the European Union later this year and globally beginning in January.
It’s not unusual for teenagers to fib about their age to set up an account on social media. In response, Meta is adding new ways to really push teens to verify their age. The way would be that if a teen tries to create a new account and puts an adult birth date in, they need to verify their age by providing an ID or recording a selfie video.
Instagram is also taking extra steps to identify accounts belonging to teens that have entered a false adult birthday for migration to the Teen Account. The social network detects such accounts when happy birthday posts are posted, as well as from user reports.
Teen account will roll out on more Meta platforms later this year.
