People who have been lobbying for Instagram to have better regulations for teens may be pleased to know the social media platform has taken action. The Meta-owned brand has over a billion active accounts and created one for teens. Instagram Teen Accounts are for teens aged 13 to 17 and should be a safer platform for them to engage in social networking. Starting today, any new and existing account holders under 18 will be moved to a teen account.
Anyone under 16 will need parent or guardian permission to open an account, and there are also adjustable supervision tools. However, kids 16 and over can regulate the settings on their own. While this is a thoughtful feature, there is the risk of teens lying about their age when opening accounts.
“We know some teens are going to try to lie about their age to get around these protections,” Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, said during an interview with The Verge.. “Which is why we are going to be building up new opportunities to verify a teen’s age.” One way they’ll be doing this is by utilizing AI to look out for clues that the account holder is under 18.
Other features include teen accounts being automatically private. Account holders won’t be able to receive messages from people they don’t follow or aren’t connected to.
“This really standardizes a lot of the work that we’ve done, simplifies it, and brings it to all teens,” Davis said. “It provides essentially a set of protections that are in place and are already populated.”
There is also the issue of teens being exposed to inappropriate content via the Explore feature. The new platform addresses this via sensitive content controls that ensure content that pops up in Explore and Reels has limited sensitive content. Additionally, a feature enables teens to pick topics they’re interested in so they see more of that content in Explore. Offensive words and phrases will be filtered out in comment sections and DM requests via the hidden words feature.
Some studies show social media use in adolescence is linked to poor sleep quality, depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. Meta attempts to address the sleep issue by including a time management tool like sleep mode to mute notifications at night and set daily limits and reminders.