Meta has announced a set of updates to Instagram Teen Accounts, which has started rolling out to underage users in India, adding an extra layer of safety while also “taking the burden away from parents”. Over 54 million teens now use Instagram Teen Accounts worldwide since the initial rollout began in September 2024.
“Teen accounts on Instagram place teens under the stated age of 18 into our most restrictive settings,” Tara Hopkins, Global Director, Public Policy, Instagram told indianexpress.com. She explained that this essentially puts restrictions on who can contact a teen, the content they see and their total usage time while adding a sleep mode between 10 pm and 7am that mutes all notifications. “If you are in that younger age category, you can’t change any of those restrictions.”
“A couple of things we have seen with teen accounts is really encouraging. First one is that we have now 54 million users who have moved into teen accounts. That’s a pretty big number, but doesn’t take into account India, Japan, Indonesia, some of these really big markets where we are only rolling out now. The other statistic that we have, even more encouraging for parents, is that 97% of teens in that younger category of 13 to 15 years, stay in the most restrictive settings,” she added.
Hopkins said for the past couple of years teens joining Instagram have been set to a private account by default. “Earlier they could toggle it to a public account. Now, with Teen Accounts, if they want to change that to a public account before the age of 16, they will have to go through a parental approval process, eve after which the parents end up supervising the team,” Hopkins said, adding that the idea behind this was to “take the burden away from parents… who now know that we are doing this automatically by default behind the scenes”.
Asked how Meta ensured that a person is actually of the stated age, Hopkins said this is one of their highest priorities. “It is hard, it is an industry-wide challenge, because it’s like an Internet problem, not just a social media problem.” But, she said, Instagram is in the US testing new systems that look at signals like users trying to change their age soon after joining. “We thought we would see a lot of this when we started to roll out. We haven’t seen as much of this activity as we imagined,” she added.
Along with using technology from a British company for age verification, Instagram also starts an age check in case an account is reported by looking for things like discrepancies in the age reported and the profile photo as well as the age of the followers an account has. Soon, the platform also plans to use app store information to verify user age in cases where this is available.
Hopkins said it is normal for teenagers to be on Instagram and not post anything as they are not connected necessarily to other teens.
With Teen Accounts, if you are not connected to someone already, someone can’t contact you. This creates quite a lot of friction for who can contact the teen, and they cannot be tagged or mentioned by someone they are not already connected to. “Teens don’t want to come across bad or icky content,” Hopkins said, explaining the rationale behind 97% of teens staying on in the restricted settings.
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“We know that teens might use Instagram differently because of teen accounts, they might use Instagram less because of teen accounts. There was a leadership decision that this was okay because in the longer term we want parents to have that confidence, and we are fine with it if that changes some of the behaviours.”
