Instagram Launches Teen Accounts with Enhanced Safety Features

Instagram Teen Accounts are a new experience designed for teens, guided by parents. These accounts come with built-in protections that limit who can contact teens and the content they see. Teens under 16 will need a parent’s permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. The protections include:

• Private accounts: Teens need to accept new followers, and people who don’t follow them can’t see their content or interact with them.
• Messaging restrictions: Teens can only be messaged by people they follow or are already connected to.
• Sensitive content restrictions: Teens are placed into the most restrictive setting of sensitive content control, limiting exposure to sensitive content.
• Limited interactions: Teens can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow, and offensive words and phrases are filtered out of comments and DM requests.
• Time limit reminders: Notifications will remind teens to leave the app after 60 minutes each day.
• Sleep mode enabled: Sleep mode mutes notifications overnight and sends auto-replies to DMs between 10 PM and 7 AM.

Teens under 16 will need their parent’s permission to use less protective settings. To get permission, teens must set up parental supervision on Instagram. Parents can then approve or deny their teens’ requests to change settings. For older teens (16+), parents can turn on parental supervision to gain oversight. Soon, parents will also be able to change these settings directly to be more protective. Learn more about how to manage Teen Accounts .

Instagram Teen Accounts offer several built-in protections to address parents’ top concerns:

• Private accounts: Teens need to accept new followers, and non-followers can’t see or interact with their content.
• Messaging restrictions: Teens can only be messaged by people they follow or are already connected to.
• Sensitive content restrictions: Teens are placed into the most restrictive setting of sensitive content control.
• Limited interactions: Teens can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow, and offensive words and phrases are filtered out.
• Time limit reminders: Notifications remind teens to leave the app after 60 minutes each day.
• Sleep mode enabled: Mutes notifications overnight and sends auto-replies to DMs between 10 PM and 7 AM.

Parents can get more involved with their teen’s Instagram usage through the updated supervision feature, which includes:

• Insights into who their teens are chatting with: Parents can see who their teen has messaged in the past seven days.
• Setting total daily time limits: Parents can decide how much time their teen can spend on Instagram each day.
• Blocking usage during specific periods: Parents can block their teens from using Instagram at night or during specific time periods.
• Viewing topics of interest: Parents can view the age-appropriate topics their teen has chosen to see content from.

The changes to Instagram Teen Accounts will start immediately. Teens who sign up for Instagram will be placed into Teen Accounts today, and existing teen users will be notified about these changes next week. The plan is to place teens into Teen Accounts within 60 days in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, and later this year in the European Union. Teens around the world will start to get Teen Accounts in January, with plans to bring Teen Accounts to other Meta platforms next year.