Meta has heavily been centered around protecting the youth on its applications like Facebook and Instagram during 2024. With the addition of stricter default message settings for teens back in January on Instagram [only people a teen already follows can message them or add them to group chats], many other features have been implemented this year.
For example, the ‘Take It Down’ feature was expanded to more countries and languages again in February on Instagram, and on Facebook the privacy preserving age verification tool was added.
On Sept. 17, 2024, Meta released their newest update on Instagram to further teen protection on the app.
This update brought forth ‘Teen Accounts,’ said by Meta to be “…a new experience for teens, guided by parents.” Teen accounts will add multiple new automatic protection features to reassure parents about the safety of their teenagers on the app. These specialized accounts will restrict the contact people have with a teen, as well as what teens can view while on the app, to make sure that teens are using the app responsibly. If a teen is under the age of 16, they will need the permission of their guardian to lessen the restrictions placed onto their account.
“We know parents want to feel confident that their teens can use social media to connect with their friends and explore their interests, without having to worry about unsafe or inappropriate experiences,” states Meta’s website.
With this idea in mind, the people at Meta designed Instagram’s new teen accounts to support parents. The features brought on by these accounts will be private accounts, messaging restrictions, sensitive content restrictions, limited interactions, time limit reminders, sleep mode enabled and topic selection.
Upon creation, teen accounts will be set to private, which means that teens will need to approve new people trying to follow them before individuals can view the teen’s content or interact with them. This restriction applies to all teens under 16, regardless of whether they have made an account already or not, and teens under 18 when they’re first signing up to get the app.
For the feature ‘sensitive content restrictions,’ they will place a teen’s account onto the most restrictive sensitive content control settings. For example, content involving violence would be considered sensitive. Meaning, teens won’t be able to view certain content when in areas in the app like the ‘Explore Page’ or ‘Reels.’
Teen accounts will also be limited in the aspect of who can directly interact with them. Unless a teen is already following an individual, they will not be able to be tagged or mentioned in content.
Simultaneously the most restrictive anti-bullying features will be placed on these accounts, in the form of hidden words. This will filter out offensive language from a teen’s comment section and direct messaging requests.
Following this, teen accounts will have time limits placed upon them. After 60 minutes of being on Instagram, a teen account will receive a notification instructing them to hop off of the app, along with the sleep mode feature. Between the times of 10 p.m. – 7 a.m., teen accounts will automatically mute notifications overnight and send an automated reply to direct messages (DMs).
Many individuals and groups have come to approve of the introduction of teen accounts, and Instagram’s path towards teen safety. The president of the National Parent Teacher Association, Yvonne Johnson states her opinion on the usefulness of it all.
“Given that parents today are grappling with the benefits and challenges of the internet and digital media for their trends, our association applauds Meta for launching Instagram Teen Accounts. With teens automatically placed in teen accounts and certain privacy settings turned on by default, this update demonstrates that Meta is taking steps to empower parents and deliver safer, more age-appropriate experiences on the platform,” Johnson says.
While there are a lot of restrictions that come forth with the new update, there also exist less restrictive features, specifically an exclusive feature made for them. This feature will allow them to select topics they wish to see more in the “Explore Page”, so that they can focus on content they are interested in.
Meta has also gone on to add multiple features for parents who wish to be more actively involved with their teens activities. This has resulted in the creation of the parental supervision feature, which allows parents to do many things like set daily time limits, block app usage, view teens’ interactions and control teen accounts’ privacy settings.
Parents will not only be able to decide how much a teen can use Instagram, causing the app to shut down if this limit is exceeded, but they can also block the usage of Instagram during certain time periods.