Instagram has introduced ‘Teen Accounts’ to provide more protections for users aged 13 to 15, while also offering parents increased oversight and reassurance of their social media usage across the platform. Meta has announced that this update is part of Instagram’s broader effort to address rising concerns about online safety and potentially harmful content that teens are exposed to.
What are Teen Accounts on Instagram?
Instagram's new Teen Accounts are designed to provide a safer experience for users under the age of 16, providing built-in protections around who teens are interacting with, the content they see, and how much time they spend online. Teen Accounts will allow young people to choose topics they want to see in their feed, to help prioritise content they are interested in. Teen Account settings will be automatically applied to users under 16, requiring parental approval to make any changes.
Default Privacy Settings
One of the key changes is the default privacy settings for teen accounts, posts by teenagers will automatically be set to private, meaning they will not be visible to users who are not approved followers. Additionally, teens will need to manually approve any new followers, ensuring they have control over who can view their content.
Messaging Restrictions
Instagram’s new features also include restrictions on messaging. Teenagers will only be able to receive messages from people they already follow, reducing the risk of inappropriate or unwanted interactions with strangers. The latest announcement follows previous updates made across Meta platforms to help prevent potential sextortion scammers from finding and messaging young people’s accounts and provides guidance to anyone who may have been sent harmful messages.
Parental Controls
Through Teen Accounts, parents will be offered a more active role in managing their children's online experience. With Instagram’s parental supervision tools, parents will be able to approve or deny changes their child requests to make to their account settings. They will also have the option to monitor who their child is messaging, set daily time limits for Instagram usage, and restrict access to the app during specific hours, such as overnight.
Enforcing Age Limits
Within their announcement, Meta also shared that they will be requiring more age verification across their platforms, alongside building technology that will ‘proactively find accounts belonging to teens’ regardless of the date they provided when signing up. This technology is expected to be tested in the USA early next year and will help to find and place teenagers under the protections of Teen Accounts.
Looking Forward
Teen Accounts are expected to roll out across Instagram within the next 60 days, across the UK, US, Canada, and Australia. Later this year, Teen Accounts are expected to be introduced across the European Union, before being released across the rest of the world in January 2025. Alongside this, Meta has revealed that they will be bringing Teen Accounts across additional Meta platforms next year.
David Wright, CEO of SWGfL and Director of the UK Safer Internet Centre, said:
"The introduction of new Instagram accounts that are designed specifically for teenagers is a welcome addition to the Instagram suite of tools that is set to support parents with managing their children’s digital activities. These new tools aim to work alongside open conversations in the household around staying safe online so we can all work towards a safer online environment collectively."
To find out more about reporting harmful content online, anyone over the age of 13 can visit Report Harmful Content for information about community guidelines and reporting routes across platforms including Instagram and Facebook.
