Instagram Rolls Out New, More Restrictive and Private Accounts for Teens

Alex Weprin
·2 min read

In a major change, Meta’s Instagram is launching a new experience specifically for teenage users, placing a number of restrictions and limits on how they use the app, and giving parents more control, in a bid to create a healthier environment for users.

“They’re an automatic set of protections for teens that try to proactively address the top concerns that we’ve heard from parents about teens online,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said on Good Morning America Tuesday. “Things like who can contact them, what content they see and how much time they spend on their device … all without requiring any involvement from the parent.”

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All teenagers will automatically be placed into teen accounts, and users under 16 will need a parent’s permission to change any settings. Meta is also developing technology to detect if a user has lied about their age, and will shift them into teen accounts if it believes they have.

“This technology will allow us to proactively find these teens and place them in the same protections offered by Teen Account settings,” Instagram said in its announcement. “We’ll start testing this change in the US early next year.”

The teen accounts will be private by default, limiting who can see them, and messaging will be retsricted to people they know. Interactions (like @ replied or tags) will be restricted to people they know, and Meta will “automatically turn on the most restrictive version of our anti-bullying feature, Hidden Words, so that offensive words and phrases will be filtered out of teens’ comments and DM requests.”

In addition, Instagram will get a notification to leave the app after they have used it for 60 minutes each day, with the app also going into sleep mode between 10 PM and 7 AM.

Instagram is beginning to roll out the new teen accounts today, and expects most teens to be in the experience within 60 days.

Instagram is also creating a new Explore experience for teens, letting them select topics they are interested in to be fed content built around those genres and tags.

Parents, meanwhile, will be able to see who their kids are chatting with, and set time limits on usage of the app. They will also be able to block their teen from using the app for specific time periods, and can see the topics that their kids selected in Explore.

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