Instagram is revamping its youth safety strategy by giving parents more oversight over what their teenagers are doing online, Meta said Tuesday, as the social media giant seeks to assuage critics who say its services compromise adolescents’ well-being.
Meta, which owns Instagram, said it would bolster efforts to limit the time teenagers spend on the social networking site, what content they see and which strangers are able find their accounts and talk to them. The new safety measures — introduced by Meta as part of a new “teen accounts” program — will also give parents more insight into the people their children are talking to and the types of posts they are consuming, while still offering the ability to set limits on their accounts.
“We are changing the experience for millions of teens on our app,” Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, said in an interview. “We’re reimagining that parent-child relationship online in response to what we heard from parents about how they parent, or want to be able to parent.”
The new rules won’t immediately apply to Meta’s original social network, Facebook, which is larger than Instagram but less popular among American teenagers. Meta, which also owns WhatsApp, said it would put other apps under similar new rules in the coming months.
Meta’s new default protections for teens are meant to help address long-standing allegations that the design of Instagram intentionally keep teens addicted to its services while hurting their well-being. But some experts say teens may find ways around the new standards, which they say leave some safety issues unaddressed. Some critics earlier suggested that tougher rules for teens on Instagram could infringe on their privacy and free speech.
“All this is better than it was before,” said Zvika Krieger, a former director of Meta’s responsible innovation team who now works as a consultant for technology companies. “I don’t want to say that it’s worthless or cosmetic, but I do think that it doesn’t solve all the problems.”
Instagram’s new tools arrive as concerns are rising among political leaders of both major parties that social media sites are contributing to a youth mental health crisis in the United States, and that tech companies are prioritizing keeping younger users engaged over their safety and well-being. Last year, 41 states and D.C. sued Meta, alleging that the company harms children by building addictive features into Instagram and Facebook while exposing them to harmful content. School districts and families have also sued Meta over how its services have affected young people.
Dozens of states have proposed or passed bills aimed at protecting kids online in recent years, including legislation barring minors from joining social media sites without their parents’ consent or requiring that tech companies verify that account creators are not underage. Several states have also sought to cut down on screen time by restricting access to smartphones during school hours or displaying pop-up notifications to young users warning of mental health risks.
The U.S. Senate in July passed a sweeping proposal that would require companies to take “reasonable” steps to prevent harm to children on their services such as cyberbullying, sexual exploitation or harassment. The Kids Online Safety Act would also force tech platforms to give parents and legal guardians the ability to manage minors’ privacy settings and monitor or restrict how much time they spend on the sites. The federal bill has not yet passed the House and many of the state laws have been challenged and halted in court in line with industry groups’ First Amendment arguments.
Meta and other social media giants have long struggled to gain traction for their parental control tools. Meta’s own internal research has demonstrated that parents often lack the time and technological understanding to properly supervise their kids’ online activities. Child safety critics have argued the companies impose weak default settings for teens, while forcing parents to do the heavy lifting to protect their kids. By the end of 2022, fewer than 10 percent of teens on Instagram had enabled the parental supervision setting, The Washington Post hasreported. Meta has repeatedly declined to offer statistics on how many teens are being supervised by their parents on Instagram.
Other companies’ parental control adoption rates are also low. Earlier this year, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel told congress that 20 million teens in the United States use the ephemeral messaging app but only 400,000 have linked their accounts to their parents, representing a 2 percent adoption rate.
Under Meta’s new approach, the company will force both new sign ups and existing users under 18 into the new “teen accounts” with stricter safety default standards. Meta, which has often shied away from changing the default settings of existing teen users, expects millions of teenagers will end up in the new supervised accounts.
All “teen accounts” will be set to private by default. Users who are 16 and 17 years old can make those accounts public, but users under 16 won’t be able to do so without parental approval. By requiring younger teens to obtain supervision before changing any of their safety settings, the company expects more teen accounts will be supervised by their parents.
“What we heard in talking to parents is how their parenting … and involvement shifts as a teen matures,” Davis said. “This is really designed to reflect that shift of the parent-child relationship.”
The company plans to place teens in the new restricted accounts within 60 days in the United States, U.K., Canada and Australia, and in other regions in January.
Meta also said it plans to use artificial intelligence to proactively find teens it suspects of lying about their age. As part of that effort, the company says it will more often ask suspected teenagers to verify their identity through an outside contractor, Yoti, one of several companies that ask users to take video selfies or hold up government IDs to verify their ages. Critics have expressed concerns about privacy lapses and fairness issues for youth who might not have an ID.
For users who end up in Instagram’s new teen accounts, the company will stop notifications between the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. That so-called Sleep Mode replaces earlier features that reminded teens to close Instagram at night. That change might not quell parents’ concerns that teenagers will simply keep checking the app when they should be sleeping, Krieger said.
The company will also start reminding teens to get off the app after an hour of usage a day, streamlining its existing approach to time limit reminders. Parents will be allowed to block their teens’ Instagram usage after a certain amount of time, or within certain windows of time.
The company is also asking teens to proactively choose the topics — such as the arts or sports — they favor for recommended content. Supervising parents will be able to see what topics their teens have chosen to see.
Parents will now also be able to see with whom their child has been recently messaging but not the messages themselves. Previously, they could only see lists of whom their children follow, who follows them and blocked accounts.
Meta’s new teen accounts largely streamlines and builds on its other teen safety efforts. In recent years, the company has tightened its standards on showing teens less “sensitive content” such as posts that are violent or sexually suggestive. The company also restricted adults’ ability to contact them and pre-checked the private account option for new teen sign ups.