As Australia and other countries debate the merits of banning kids under 14 from social media, Meta has announced a significant "reimagining" of teenagers' experience of Instagram.
Author
Tama Leaver
Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University
These new "Teen Accounts" will be set to private by default, have the maximum content and messaging restrictions possible, pause notifications at night, and add new ways for teens to indicate their content preferences.
Importantly, for kids under the age of 16, changing these default settings will now require parental permission.
The move, touted as giving "peace of mind" for parents, is a welcome step - but parents and guardians should use it to talk to their kids about online spaces.
What's different about Teen Accounts?
Teen Accounts are a combination of new features and a repackaging of a number of tools that have already been in place, but haven't had the visibility or uptake Meta would have preferred.
Bringing these incremental changes together under the umbrella of Teen Accounts should make these changes more visible to teens and caregivers.
Among the the main features:
under-18s will have accounts set to private by default, and under-16s will only be able to change that setting with parental permission
teens will only be able to receive messages from people they are already following or are connected to
content restrictions and the blocking of offensive words in comments and messages will be set to the maximum setting possible
notifications from Instagram will be turned off between 10pm and 7am
teens will be reminded to leave Instagram after 60 minutes of use on any given day.
Some of these tools are more useful than others. A reminder to leave Instagram after 60 minutes that teens can just click past sets a fairly low bar in terms of time management.
But default account settings matter. They can really shape a user's experience of a platform. Teens having private accounts by default, with protections around content and messaging set to their strongest settings, will significantly shape their time on Instagram.
Stopping under-16s from changing these settings without parental or guardian consent is the biggest change, and really does differentiate the teen experience of Instagram from the adult one.
Most of these changes focus on safety and age-appropriate experiences. But it is a positive step for Meta to also include new ways for teens to indicate the content they actually prefer, instead of just relying on algorithms to infer these preferences.
Do parents and guardians have to do anything?
In promoting Teen Accounts, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri emphasised the change is aimed at giving parents "peace of mind". It doesn't require explicit intervention from parents for these changes to occur.
"I'm a dad, and this is a significant change to Instagram and one that I'm personally very proud of," noted Mosseri. This is part of a longer-term strategy of positioning Mosseri as a prominent parental voice to increase his perceived credibility in this domain.
Parents or guardians will need to use their own accounts for "supervision" if they want to know what teens are doing on Instagram, or have access to more granular controls. These include setting personalised time limits, seeing an overview of a teen's activity, or allowing any of the default settings to change.
The real opportunity for parents here is to take these changes as a chance to discuss with their children how they're using Instagram and other social media platforms.
No matter what safety measures are in place, it's vital for parents to build and maintain a sense of openness and trust so young people can turn to them with questions, and share difficulties and challenges they encounter online.
Meta has said the shift to Teen Accounts will reduce the level of inappropriate content teens might encounter, but that can never be absolute.
These changes minimise the risks, but don't remove them. Ensuring young people have someone to turn to if they see, hear, or experience something that's inappropriate or makes them uncomfortable will always be incredibly important. That's real peace of mind.
Can't teens still lie about their age?
Initially, Teen Accounts will apply to new teens who sign up. The changes will also roll out for existing teen users whose birth date Instagram already has on file.
Over time, Mosseri and Antigone Davis, Meta's global head of safety, have both said Instagram is rolling out new tools that will identify teenagers using Instagram even if they didn't enter an accurate birth date. These tools are not active yet, but are supposed to be coming next year.
This is a welcome change if it proves accurate. However, the effectiveness of inferring or estimating age is yet to be proven.
The bigger picture
Teen Accounts are launching in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States this week, taking up to 60 days to reach all users in those countries. Users in the rest of the world are scheduled to get Teen Accounts in January 2025.
For a long time, Instagram hasn't done enough to look after the interests of younger users. Child rights advocates have mostly endorsed Teen Accounts as a significant positive change in young people's experiences and safety on Instagram.
Yet it remains to be seen whether Meta has done enough to address the push in Australia and elsewhere to ban young people (whether under-14s or under-16s, depending on the proposal) from all social media.
Teen Accounts are clearly a meaningful step in the right direction, but it's worth remembering it took Instagram 14 years to get to this point. That's too long.
Ultimately, these changes should serve as a prompt for any platform open to kids or teens to ensure they provide age-appropriate experiences. Young users can gain a lot from being online, but we must minimise the risks.
In the meantime, if these changes open the door for parents and guardians to talk to young people about their experiences online, that's a win.
Tama Leaver receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child (CE200100022). He co-authored the book Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures (Polity, 2020) with Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin.
