Instagram announces restrictive 'Teen Accounts' for users under 16

Instagram just unveiled a much more restricted way for teens under 16 to use its app. Known as Teen Accounts, parent company Meta says its part of a "reimagining" of their platform for teens, in light of ongoing concerns about youth safety on the app — and they plan to apply it to all Meta platforms in the future.

A Teen Account is automatically set to private, with limits on who can message and interact with them. Accounts are placed under default content restrictions, as well, and the app will provide time limit notifications urging users to leave the app after 60 minutes. Teen Accounts are opted-in to an automatic, do-not-disturb sleep mode between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., silencing notifications and auto-replying to DMs. Sleep mode can also be adjusted to fully block a teen from using the app.

Users under 16 can also select specific topics they want to be served in the app's Explore page and post recommendations. Parents and guardians can be added to a Teen Account to monitor interactions, time limits, and settings — any changes to the default settings must be approved by a guardian.

"Instagram Teen Accounts reflect the importance of tailoring teens’ online experiences to their developmental stages, and implementing appropriate protections," wrote Northeastern University professor Rachel Rodgers in the company's press release. "Younger adolescents are more vulnerable as their skills are still emerging and require additional safeguards and protection. Overall, the settings are age-specific, with younger and older teens being offered different protections."

Instagram has beefed up its teen safety measures in recent months, including a recent update that defaults all teen accounts into the most strict content control settings. But an investigative report by the Wall Street Journal found that underage users are still repeatedly shown sexually explicit and harmful videos via the app's tentpole video product, Reels. Young users weren't just encountering content outside of the app's moderation, they were also being served "more pornography, gore, and hate speech" than adults, according to internal documents from 2022 reviewed by the publication.

Teen users have also been known to lie about their ages to get around automatic restrictions. To curb this, the platform says it will ask for more frequent age verification, and will test a technology that "proactively finds accounts belonging to teens" next year.

Instagram will transition existing under-16 users into Teen Accounts over the next 60 days. Any teen signing up for a new Instagram account will immediately be placed into a Teen Account. The feature will go global in January.