Instagram is trying to make the platform safer for kids by making teen accounts private by default in response to the growing backlash against how social media is affecting young people’s lives.
Anyone under 18 who signs up on Instagram in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia starting on Tuesday will be transferred into an adolescent-restricted account, and those who already have an account will be switched over within the next sixty days.
Meta admits that teenagers may lie about their true age and often try to create an account using an adult birthday. But now they have to authenticate their ages in additional situations. The Menlo Park, California-based company said that they are developing a technology that will automatically classify underage accounts that are pretending to be grown-ups and automatically place them into restricted teen accounts.
Teenagers can only receive private messages from the people they follow or are already connected with. Sensitive content, such as videos and photos showing violence or promoting cosmetic procedures, will be limited. Teens will also receive notifications if they stay on Instagram for 60 minutes or more. Additionally, sleep modes are enabled from 10 pm to 7 am, which turns off the notifications and sends auto-replies to direct messages.
While these settings are enabled for teenagers, 16- and 17-year-olds can disable them. Children under 16 need parental consent to do so.
The announcement comes as the company is facing a lawsuit from dozens of US states that accuse them of harming young people and knowingly designing features that would cause minors to be addicted to the platform and contributing to their mental health crisis.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said Meta’s announcement was an important step to ensure that kids will be protected from social media. He is collaborating with New York authorities to implement this law to cut children’s access to addictive social media feeds.
In the past, the efforts made by Meta in addressing teen safety and mental health have come under fire for not going far enough. For example, kids can easily ignore the notification that appears after they have spent on the app for 60 minutes and continue scrolling. That’s unless the parents turn on parental supervision, which allows the parents to set the time limit on Instagram to a specific amount, say 15 minutes.
With the latest changes, Meta gives parents more choices to manage and oversee their kids’ accounts. Kids under 16 must need their parents’ permission to change their settings to a less restrictive mode. They can do that by connecting to parent and enabling parental supervision of their accounts.
Teen accounts will create a big incentive for parents and teens to set up parental supervision. Now, parents will be able to see who is messaging their teens and hopefully have a conversation with their teens regarding assistance for their kids in navigating challenging situations like bullying or harassment.
Instagram boss Mosseri says that the idea behind increased restriction was similar to the plan for ‘Instagram Youth,’ which was an app for minors under 13 years of age. That plan was scarped later in 2021, and no attempts went ahead to revive it.
These new ‘teen account’ as Meta calls them, might find their way into other company apps like Facebook. It is usually faster to start on one app and iterate it to the rest of the family apps.
Mosseri states that these new restrictions will start for the better part of the year, and they were not intended to appease angry lawmakers but instead aimed towards satisfying the parents and teens.