Instagram Launches Teen Accounts, Makes Platform Safe For Minors

Instagram will now make minors' accounts private by default to make the platform safer amid parents' growing concerns about social media's impact on young people.

"We’re introducing Instagram Teen Accounts to reassure parents that teens are having safe experiences with built-in protections on automatically," the app announced on its official blog.

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Starting Tuesday in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia, anyone under 18 who creates a new Instagram account will be placed into restrictive teen accounts. Existing accounts for users under 18 will be migrated over 60 days. Teens in the European Union will have their accounts adjusted later this year.

Meta, Facebook's parent company, has acknowledged that teenagers may lie about their age. As a result, they plan to make changes that will require teens to verify their ages more often, particularly when they try to create a new account using an adult birthday. The company is also developing technology to identify teen accounts disguised as adults' accounts and place them into restricted teen accounts automatically.

What Parents and their Children Should Know About Instagram's New 'Teen Accounts'

Teen Accounts' Features

The new changes for teen accounts on Instagram include default privacy settings, and restricting young users' private messages to people they follow or are already connected to. Content deemed "sensitive," such as videos of people fighting, including promoting cosmetic procedures, will be limited.

Moreover, teens can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow on the app. The platform will also automatically activate the most restrictive version of its anti-bullying feature, Hidden Words, to filter out offensive words and phrases from teens' comments and DM requests.

Teens will also receive notifications if they spend more than 60 minutes on the app, and a "sleep mode" will be enabled from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., turning off notifications and sending auto-replies to direct messages.

While these settings will be turned on for all teens, 16 and 17-year-olds will be able to turn them off. Kids under 16 will need their parents’ permission to do so.

“The three concerns we’re hearing from parents are that their teens are seeing content that they don’t want to see or that they’re getting contacted by people they don’t want to be contacted by or that they’re spending too much time on the app,” said Naomi Gleit, head of product at Meta. “So teen accounts is focused on addressing those three concerns.”

More ways parents can get involved

While Teen Accounts automatically put new protections in place, many parents want to be more involved in their teen’s experiences. The app is enhancing its supervision feature to accommodate this need.

Parents can now have more control and insight into their teen's Instagram activities. Some of the new features include the ability to see who their teen has messaged in the past seven days, set daily time limits for their teen's Instagram usage, block their teen from using Instagram during specific time periods, and view the age-appropriate topics their teen has chosen to see content from.

Thinking about setting up an Instagram account for your child? Check out these important considerations.