Shreya Varanasi, Pune
On Tuesday, Meta announced the launch of new ‘Teen Accounts’ on Instagram for users under the age of 18 years, amid growing concerns over online safety. These accounts will give parents more oversight of their children’s online activities as parental permission is required for changing settings. These accounts will not just apply to new teenage users, but will additionally move to existing ones in the coming months.
Teen accounts include increased parental restrictions, such as prohibiting access during the night between 10 PM and 7 AM, limiting interactions to being tagged or mentioned by people they follow, and monitoring direct messages and content topics browsed by teens. Apart from this, the teens will receive alerts to stop using the app after 60 minutes each day. This update will affect all Instagram accounts belonging to users below the age of 18 in the United Kingdom, United States of America, Australia, and Canada within the next 60 days. By default, these accounts will be set to private.
Users who are under the age of 16 will require parental permission to update their privacy settings, whilst those aged 16 and 17 will have more freedom to adjust their profiles on their own. Along with other monitoring features, parents can see which accounts their children are chatting from, but they will be unable to read their conversations. Instagram stated it will use artificial intelligence to proactively detect these minors’ accounts and place them in more restricted accounts if they try to fool the app by altering their birthday.
“We look forward to hearing from teens about their experience of these new Teen Accounts and associated features and settings,” said Dr. Megan Moreno, Co-Medical Director of the SAMHSA-Funded AAP Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, in Meta’s announcement.
The announcement aligns with possible legislation changes in Australia, which might increase the minimum age for social media access. Antigone Davis, Meta’s director of global safety, explained that these adjustments are motivated by parental concerns rather than government requests.
As Meta continues to prioritize teenagers’ safety, it may explore extending similar safeguards to its other platforms, such as Facebook, in the future.