Meta Teen Accounts Aim to Revolutionize Online Safety
On Tuesday, September 17th, Meta launched Instagram Teen accounts, and we had the opportunity to speak with a member of the Meta team and get some insight into what these new accounts will bring to families. This latest rollout of teen accounts is the first of its kind and a new approach to the mounting concerns about the influence of social media on today’s teens. As teens are tackling loneliness and social media pressures, parents are left questioning how they can help, and Meta aims to provide that support. The question remains: will these accounts truly impact teen safety online?
Concerns on a National Scale
Growing concerns about the impact of social media on children’s mental health have prompted actions at both the state and federal levels. Last year, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy stressed the need for parents to monitor their children’s social media habits. In June, New York Governor Kathy Hochul passed two bills to make social media safer for kids. The federal government is also working on the Kids Online Safety Act to address issues such as bullying and harmful content. Parents nationwide are worried about the lack of online safety measures for children on social media platforms and are calling for these platforms to do something about it.
Meta, among several social media platforms, has faced criticism for not having adequate systems in place for teens. However, they are now the first to roll out protections. This approach could shift the social media landscape and begin to ensure children’s safety, but it’s honestly too soon to tell. However, what we do know is what these new accounts offer parents, how this all started, and everything you need to know about Teen Accounts.
We had the opportunity to speak with Liza Crenshaw, a member of the Meta team, to understand what these accounts provide to parents and Meta’s goals with Teen Accounts.
A Conversation with Meta
What are some standout features that parents should know about?
Teen Accounts were designed specifically with parents’ concerns in mind. We talked to so many parents around the world about what their worries were when it came to their teens using social media. We heard that they have three big concerns: one is contact, who their teens are talking to; two is content, are teens looking at content that is too mature or sensitive, and three is time, is [a] teens’ time being well spent on the app; are they scrolling for too long, using it overnight, or during school.
With those three big concerns in mind, we designed Teen Accounts’ protections to adjust those things. We will be turning teens’ [accounts] into private accounts automatically. We’ll also be sending reminders when teens have been on the app for 60 minutes. We’re turning on a feature called sleep mode, which mutes notifications overnight and sends auto-replies in DMS. [For example], if someone messages them [the reply will] say, “[this person] is in sleep mode right now; they’ll get back to you in the morning.”
We’re taking steps to limit who can message teens. Teens will only be able to be messaged by people that they follow or who they’re already connected to. That really cuts down on strangers who might be messaging teens and adults who aren’t really appropriate for teens to talk to. We’re also turning on our hidden words feature, which limits bullying or offensive comments in DMS. It’s really a full suite of protections that are built in and automatically on with Teen Accounts.
Will these new features be easy to navigate for parents?
Yes, so again, we did design this with parents in mind. We wanted to make sure that parents didn’t feel like they had another burden being added to their plate but that they could really have the confidence to know that their teens are able to use Instagram safely from the get-go. The idea with teen accounts is that teens are automatically placed into age-appropriate protections, and parents don’t even have to do anything.
However, if teens under 16 want to change any of the protections, they do have to get a parent’s permission to do so. Parents can be reassured that their teens can’t escape these protections unless they give their permission. But we also know that some parents want to be more involved in their day-to-day teens’ online lives, so we added additional features that parents could choose to use, including messaging insights; parents can see who their teens have been chatting with in the past week. They can’t actually read their teen’s DMS, but they can see who they’ve been talking to and whether the teen has any shared connections with those people.
Which is actually one of my favorite features because I heard from a lot of parents who think this is great because they can see if [for example] someone they know has been bullying their child in school sends [their teen] a message, then that’s an opportunity for the parent to say “hey I saw that you were chatting to [this person], I know you guys have had conflicts, what’s going on there?” But it still lets teens have their own freedom and autonomy to send messages without feeling like their parents are peeking over their shoulders.
Today, kids have Finstas or Fake Instagram accounts where they lie about their age. How will these accounts work around that?
So, from the get-go, we knew that Teen Accounts wouldn’t work unless we were preventing teens from lying or getting around this. So we built a ton of different ways to prevent from lying. For instance, if a teen tries to change their age from under eighteen to over eighteen, for example, if they say, “I don’t want to be in a teen account, I’m just going to say I’m 25”, we will require them to verify their age either with an ID or with a video selfie that estimates their age on the back end.
We’re also building out what we call an age prediction model that uses thousands and thousands of signals, including the type of language that teens use, who they’re talking to, and how old their friends are, to actually really accurately estimate how old a teenager is. If we see that there’s a mismatch between the age the teens told us they are and the age our model predicts them to be, then we’ll place that person into protections automatically out of an abundance of caution.
We think about it as a multilayered approach because it’s really challenging to get age right, so we’re going at it from a bunch of different angles.
These accounts are currently only available in specific locations but are expected to be introduced globally in 2025. Should we expect to see additional features added to these supervised accounts?
We might. Right now, we’re just really focused on getting this out and right to the tens of millions of teens that will get these changes. It’s a really fundamental change to teens’ experience on Instagram, and we want to get this right first and foremost.
We expect there might be some bumps along the way, but we want to iterate and make sure that we get people into these protections, and then we’ll figure out what’s next.
We’re interested to know what the feedback from teens has been like. How do they feel about the integration of Teen Accounts?
It’s actually really interesting because we had a hypothesis internally that teens would hate this and not really want to be placed into these protections. But actually, what we heard and what we’ve been hearing since the rollout is that teens themselves also don’t really want to get unwanted contact in their DMS; they really don’t want to see [certain] content. So they’ve actually welcomed the changes to an extent, and I think particularly for younger teens, they see this as an opportunity to build trust with their parent and figure out a way to navigate social media together versus just having the parent have complete oversight and control.
It’s really a way to start conversations. Younger teens, in particular, [feel] they can establish some trust with their parents, they can have some boundaries in place, and gradually maybe the parent might relax some things, and give them a bit more freedom.
We feel like this is an opportunity for parents and teens to start to establish a two-way conversation in a way that still feels safe and age-appropriate, and again lets teens use Instagram for all of the good things like discovering new artists they want to follow, connecting with classmates, talking to friends and family. I think sometimes, people forget all of the good things that come from social media, so our goal with this is to preserve the good and minimize the bad.
For more information on Instagram Teen Accounts, head to about.instagram.com.
