Instagram will introduce new Teen Accounts for under-16s starting today, offering new protections for young people and greater oversight for parents.
The feature, which will see all teens in Australia moved onto these new accounts within 60 days, comes fresh off the back of the federal government’s plan to implement a new minimum age for social media.
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said in a media conference that the two announcements are not connected.
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Instagram’s Teen Accounts come with built-in “protections” to help young users avoid potentially harmful or inappropriate content and allow parents to monitor how their children use the platform.
“We’ve tried wherever possible to find the overlap between what parents want and what teens want,” Mosseri said in a media conference.
“I’m sure there will some be some parents who think that we aren’t going far enough, and there’ll be some teens who think we’ve gone too far.
“We’re trying to balance these different equities.”
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Teen Accounts will automatically be set to private, with the most restrictive content controls and the highest anti-bullying restrictions applied by default.
These accounts can also only be contacted, tagged or mentioned by accounts they follow and their Explore feeds will be populated based on topics they choose.
Instagram also aims to address concerns about teens spending too much time on social media with the news accounts.
Teen Accounts will send users notifications telling them to stop using the app after 60 minutes, and they come with a default Sleep Mode that mutes notifications and automatically replies to DMs between the hours of 10pm and 7am.
All of these features come automatically enabled on the new Teen Accounts and require parental permission to modify, through Instagram’s parental supervision feature.
“We want to make sure that we do all we can to keep Instagram safe for teens in a way that doesn’t require parents to do anything,” Mosseri said.
“But for parents who do want to get more involved, provide robust guardian control.”
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Other Teen Account functions include message monitoring, which will allow parents to see which accounts their teens have messaged in the last seven days, however they will not see the content of the messages.
Parents can also set daily time limits that block the app after a certain amount of use, they can block the app between pre-set times (eg at night) and monitor the topics their teens are viewing content about.
But what if teens try to get around these new restrictions by changing their birthday in the app, or by opening a new account with an older birthday?
Since 2022, Instagram has required users under 18 to prove their age with a video selfie or ID check when trying to change their birthday and will continue to do so with the new Teen Accounts to prevent under-16s from lying about their age.
The same strategy will be used to try to prevent young people from setting up accounts with an adult birthday, however Instagram opted not to share all the details so as not to give teens a “manual” to get around the rules.
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Instagram is also building new AI tools designed to proactively identify accounts with adult birthdays that actually belong to teens and moved them across to more protected Teen Accounts.
Testing for this technology is slated to begin in the US in early 2025.
“Verifying or even just understanding age at scale is just tough,” Mosseri admitted.
“It’s just a hard problem to solve.”
The rollout of Teen Accounts will begin today, with all under-16s who sign up for new Instagram accounts automatically being set up with a Teen Account.
Australians under the age of 16 will start being moved across to Teen Accounts this week, with plans to have all under-16s in the UK, US, Canada and Australia moved across within 60 days.
Young people in the EU will be moved onto Teen Accounts later this year.
Under-16 in the rest of the world will start being moved across in January 2025.
Meta has also revealed it intends to implement Teen Accounts across its other social media platforms next year.
As well as Instagram, Meta owns Facebook, Threads, and WhatsApp.
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