Anyone with a teenager at home knows how popular the social network is with younger users. But to help parents better guide their teens under 18, Instagram has just announced new Teen Accounts.
Teen Accounts Include Messaging Restrictions
The new Teen Accounts settings will begin today for any teenager who signs up for Instagram. Existing Instagram users who are teenagers in the United States, UK, Canada, and Australia will be moved into Teen Accounts in the next 60 days. Teen Accounts will also be rolling out to other Meta properties in 2025.
Most importantly, all teens under 18 will have a private account by default.
For messaging, teens will only be able to receive messages from users they follow or are already connected to. Teen Accounts will also be placed into the most restrictive sensitive content control.
Teens will only be able to be tagged or mentioned by people they follow. Instagram will also turn on the most restrictive version of its Hidden Words feature to help prevent bullying. That filters out offensive words and phrases from comments and DM requests.
After 60 minutes of use, teens will receive a notification telling them to leave the app. With sleep mode, turned on between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., all notifications will be noted and DMs will send an automatic reply.
Teens under 16 will need parental permission to change to less protective settings. That will require a new Parental Supervision feature. With that, parents can see who their teens are messaging with, but not see the message itself. They can also set daily time limits for Instagram use and block Instagram during specific time periods.
Reasonable Protection for Teens
As a parent of a teen who can’t get enough of her Instagram feed, I’m really pleased with these new changes.
We’re always talking about how to use social media correctly and some of the many pitfalls on sites like Instagram, but Teen Accounts can provide parents with a clear look at how their children are using the social network.
I’m glad to see that other sites popular with teens are also creating reasonable protections for teens. Just like with YouTube’s new parental control for teen content creators, Instagram is headed in the right direction to satisfy both parents and teenagers.
