Teenagers on Instagram will soon be automatically placed in a new type of account with built-in privacy restrictions that give parents more control.
On Tuesday, Meta, the social media platform’s parent company, will begin rolling out its “teen accounts” feature, which aims to put all teens — including those who may try to lie about their ages — into private accounts that can be messaged, tagged or mentioned only by people they already follow. It’s the company’s most significant move yet to manage how minors use Instagram.
The feature is Meta’s latest effort to combat child safety issues across its platforms. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized to parents at a Senate online child safety hearing who said Instagram contributed to their children’s suicides or exploitation.
In recent years, the company has released a variety of features and opt-in restrictions aimed at teen users, including parental supervision controls. But so far, they’ve been sporadically applied.
Naomi Gleit, head of product at Meta, said it has been working to bundle new and existing tools into a more standardized package.
“Everyone under 18, creators included, will be put into teen accounts,” Gleit told NBC News. “They can remain public if their parent is involved and gives them permission and is supervising the account. But these are pretty big changes that we need to get right.”
The company has “gotten a lot of feedback from parents, mostly about a few things,” Gleit said.
“One, it can be simpler and easier to use, and so that’s one of the goals of this launch,” she said. “Two, there’s some inconsistencies in the current settings that we do have. … And then the third thing is really just wanting to have more control and tools to help their teen online.”
The rollout won’t be immediate, however. New users will be defaulted into teen accounts upon sign-up if they are under 18, but existing teen users may not see immediate changes. Many around the world won’t be placed into teen accounts until next year, according to a Meta fact sheet.
Aside from the new privacy limits, such accounts will also be placed in the most restrictive content setting that limits potentially sensitive content from accounts they don’t follow. The accounts will have the Hidden Words feature on, as well, meaning offensive words or phrases should be automatically filtered from any comments or direct messages they receive.
Users under 16 will need parents’ or other guardians’ permission to change their new teen account settings, whereas teens older than 16 will be able to adjust them on their own unless their accounts are still linked to parental supervisors.
Meta expects teens to try to find workarounds, Gleit said, which is why it plans to test a slew of measures to prevent them from changing their ages or creating new accounts with adult birthdays.
“If you have one account and then you try to create a new account on the same phone, we will ask you to age-verify, so asking for a government ID or asking for a video selfie to prove your age,” Gleit said.
Meta might also be able to trace teens who use different devices to create adult accounts if they, for example, register with their original teen accounts’ same email addresses or phone numbers.
“And we’re also working on a technology to try to predict, for people that have a stated age as an adult, do we think they’re lying and they might actually be a teen,” Gleit said. “For those people, we also want to ask them to age-verify and put them in teen accounts, as well.”
Using artificial intelligence, the technology, which Meta claims is a first for the industry, aims to help Instagram predict whether users are over or under age 18 — even if their accounts list adult birthdays.
The age prediction tools, scheduled to go into testing in the U.S. early next year, will scrutinize behavioral signals such as when an account was created, what kind of content and accounts it interacts with, and how the user writes. Those who Meta deems could be teens will then be asked to verify their ages.
Gleit declined to give more in-depth details about how the technology will work, saying the company wants to keep teens from figuring out exactly how to circumvent its detection tools.
Parents who set up supervision controls, which require both the guardians and their teens to opt in, will now be able to see whom their teens have been messaging — although they won’t be able to read the actual conversations. They will also be able to see which topics their teens have expressed interest in, as teen accounts will be able to select specific topics they’d like to see more of on their Explore pages.
And for teen accounts, a new “Sleep Mode” (which replaces the existing Quiet Mode and Night Nudges features) will silence notifications and send autoreplies from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.
The accounts will also receive new “Daily Limit” prompts encouraging them to close Instagram after 60 minutes of use. Parental supervisors will be able to further customize which hours they wish to block their teens’ access to the app or set maximum time limits for each day.
But just as teens are likely to lie about their ages on social media, Meta is similarly preparing for those who may try to hijack their parental supervision controls. Teen accounts won’t be able to supervise other teen accounts, Gleit said, and there will be a limit to how many teen accounts one person can supervise.
“Our approach really is to give parents control,” Gleit said. “We think parents know their teens best, and so I don’t think that all of those controls are necessarily right for everyone, but we want to give parents the options to choose what’s right for their child.”
