Everything To Know About Instagram’s New ‘Teen Accounts’

Instagram has announced new features to protect young users from dangers on its platform. The Meta-owned Instagram now includes "built-in protections" for young people with increased restrictions and parental controls. Meta has unveiled new "teen accounts" settings, which aim to put all teens into private accounts that can be messaged, tagged, or mentioned only by people they already follow. The latest update is the company's most crucial move to manage how minors use Instagram.

Meta will automatically place teens into Teen Accounts, and teens under 16 will need permission of a parent to change any of these settings to be less strict. The tech giant mentioned in its blog that the new Teen Account protections are designed to address parents’ biggest concerns, including who their teens are talking to online, the content they are seeing, and whether their time is being well spent. Meta will begin placing teens into Teen Accounts within 60 days in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, before rolling out to other countries later this year and next.

With new default private accounts, teens are required to accept new followers, and people who do not follow them cannot see their content or interact with them. This applies to all teens under 16, including those already on Instagram and those signing up, and teens under 18 when they sign up for the app.

Word of the week: Instagram Teen Account.

Now on @instagram, teens will automatically be placed into more protective settings to reassure parents that teens are having safe experiences. pic.twitter.com/dOhKy8HqzF

— Meta Newsroom (@MetaNewsroom) September 17, 2024

Apart from this feature, there will also be messaging restrictions and sensitive content restrictions. Teens will receive notifications telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day. For such accounts, sleep mode will be turned on between 10 PM and 7 AM, which will mute notifications overnight and send auto-replies to DMs.

Along with these changes, Instagram is also updating the parental controls. Parents will now be able to see who their teen has messaged in the past seven days. Parents also have the option to block their teens from using Instagram at night or for specific time periods. Moreover, parents can decide how much time their teen can spend on social media platform each day. Once a teen hits that limit, they will no longer be able to access Instagram.