New York
CNN
—

Instagram on Tuesday announced its most sweeping effort yet to protect young users from dangers on its platform, rolling out new “teen account” settings that will automatically make millions of teen accounts private and limit what types of content those users can view on the app.

The change in the way Instagram lets teens use the platform comes nearly three years after the explosive “Facebook Papers” first drew massive attention to the risks the platform poses to young users.

The new restrictions also aim to give pushteens parental controls through the app. Instagram will automatically apply the new “teen account” settings to all users under 18. After the update, 16- and 17-year-old users will be able to manually reset the app to their preferred settings, but 13- to 15-year-old users will need to get parental permission to make such changes.

The new “teen accounts” settings build on more than 30 wellbeing and parental controls that parent company Meta has rolled out in recent years, such as “take a break” nudges and restrictions on “age-inappropriate” content like posts about eating disorders. Despite those earlier updates, the company has continued to face criticism for putting too much responsibility for safety on the shoulders of parents and, in some cases, teens themselves. For example, the parental controls relied on teens to let their parents know they were on the app.

Pressure on Meta to better protect teens grew again after Arturo Bejar, a new Facebook employee turned whistleblower, told a Senate subcommittee hearing in November that Meta’s top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, ignored warnings for years about the dangers to teens on the company’s platforms.

Court documents from recent lawsuits against the company also allege that Zuckerberg repeatedly obstructed teen welfare initiatives, that Meta knowingly refused to block accounts of children under 13, and that the company empowered child abusers.

During a Senate hearing in January, Zuckerberg apologized to families who said their children had been harmed by social media.

According to Meta, the latest changes are intended to “address parents’ biggest concerns: who their teens are talking to online, what content they’re watching, and whether they’re spending their time wisely.”

The “teen accounts” update means that accounts for users under 18, both new and existing, will automatically be set to private and put on the strictest messaging settings. The overhaul will allow teen users to only receive messages from people they’re already connected to. Instagram will also limit who can tag teens in photos or mention them in comments to only people they follow.

Additionally, teens will be placed under Instagram’s most restrictive content control settings. The shift limits the types of “sensitive” content teens can see on their Explore page and in Reels, such as posts promoting cosmetic procedures.

Instagram had already started implementing this strategy earlier this year, albeit on a more limited scale.

Teen users will also get time limit reminders that prompt them to leave after spending 1 hour on the app each day. And the app will default to “sleep mode,” muting notifications and automatically responding to direct messages between 10pm and 7am.

Instagram plans to roll out the changes to all teen accounts in some countries, including the United States, starting next week.

The app will also add new features to its parental controls tool, allowing parents to see which accounts their teen has recently messaged, set an overall daily time limit on teens’ Instagram usage, prevent teens from using Instagram at night or during other specific time periods, and see what topics their teen wants to view content about in the app.

The changes are expected to roll out to all teen accounts in the US, UK, Canada and Australia within 60 days, with additional countries rolling out later this year and next year.

But the effectiveness of some of the changes could be hampered by a simple truth: Meta has no way to know for sure whether it’s a parent monitoring teen accounts rather than, say, an older friend. Meta doesn’t do formal parental verification, but says it relies on signals such as the adult user’s date of birth and how many other accounts they manage to determine whether it should monitor a teen account, a spokesperson said.

Meta has long been criticized for not doing more to prevent teens from lying about their age when creating a new account to bypass security restrictions.

The company says it is implementing artificial intelligence technology aimed at identifying teen accounts that may be falsely listing an adult’s date of birth.

According to Meta, the new features were developed in consultation with the Safety Advisory Board, which consists of independent experts and organizations in the field of online safety and a group of youth advisors. Feedback was also gathered from other teens, parents and government officials.