In September of 2024, Instagram rolled out robust new teen accounts in response to ongoing concerns and lawsuits leveled by worried parents. Implemented across the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia, these new versions of Instagram accounts offer more thorough security features designed to protect kids from exploitive online interactions.

What are these features, and do they actually help? 

The safety features in Instagram’s teen accounts fall under a few broad categories, each one responding to concerns parents have vocalized. 

1. Private accounts

Starting in September 2024, any person under 18 who signs up for an Instagram account will find it automatically set to private. If the user is under 16, they can’t change that feature without a parent’s consent. 

Accounts set to private can’t be messaged by anyone unless they’re already following each other. Tags and the remix feature are also limited to friends. Posts and stories can only be viewed by approved followers.

This makes it much harder for a predator to target a teenager and glean information about them from their profile. 

2. Age verification

Since 2022, teenagers have had to verify their age using either a photo ID or a selfie video. A third party can also vouch for young users. Those measures have now been enhanced, and verification will be required if anyone tries to change their age to be older than what they initially put in their account settings.

Videos are mostly age-verified using third-party A.I. tools. Artificial intelligence is also being implemented to crawl profiles themselves, flagging potential indicators that users might actually be underage.

3. Parental controls

Enhanced parental controls are one of the biggest changes rolled out for the new Instagram teen accounts. With parental supervision enabled, a caregiver can link their account to their teen’s. The parent then can approve or deny requests to change settings, see who their child has been messaging with (without access to read the messages themselves), and set content and screen time parameters. Parents can also view the follower list for supervised accounts. Teens are able to visit a designated Family Center to see exactly what their parent has access to, and can also send a notification to their parent when they block a user or report content.

Parents must have their own active Instagram account in order to link to their teenager’s. To avoid unrelated adults abusing this system and linking themselves to kids, the teen account must accept the invitation to link.

Instagram’s help center explains the process: “Setting up supervision on Instagram requires both a teen and their parent to agree to supervision. First, a teen or their parent sends an invite for supervision. Then, the invite must be accepted for supervision to start. If a teen sends the invite, they must then confirm the parent who accepted the invite is the correct person to supervise their account. Keep in mind, only one parent can be supervising a teen’s account… Parents who want to supervise more than one teen can send the same invite to each teen they want to supervise.”

4. Content filtering

Instagram automatically filters teenagers’ experience to include less controversial, suggestive, or potentially harmful content. The platform also allows parents to observe about three dozen topics their child is interested in, making it possible for them to then choose keywords, phrases, or topics to filter out. 

The auto-hide option also applies to messages and comments. This means that if someone sends a DM containing offensive language to a teen account, it will automatically be hidden. Both parents and teenagers can always access a full list of what words or phrases are restricted on their account. 

5. Screen limits

Teen accounts include the ability to limit screen time, and linked parent accounts can adjust what those limits are. Kids will receive reminders as their limit approaches, as well as suggestions to take breaks. 

There is also the option of setting up “sleep mode,” which will activate on the designated days of the week at designated times. The idea is that this promotes better sleep hygiene and less late-night screen time. 

Now that you know what safety features exist for teenagers on Instagram, we can address the most important question: do they actually help?

Experts are divided.

On the one hand, many of these features are in response to what parents have directly asked for. 

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, clearly states that parents guide their choices: “They’ve been clear about what they’re most concerned about, and we’re trying to proactively address those concerns without requiring their involvement. But if a parent wants to get involved, we’ve also built some robust tools to allow them to shape the experience into what’s most appropriate for their teen, because at the end of the day, a parent always knows what’s best for their child.”

“It’s addressing the same three concerns we’re hearing from parents around unwanted contact, inappropriate contact and time spent,” Naomi Gleit, Meta’s head of product, told NPR.

These adjustments also aim to respond to an increasing body of research that aims to answer parents’ anxiety about their teenagers’ mental health and how social media impacts it. 50% of teenagers show symptoms of technology addiction, which makes sense given that social media platforms intentionally design their algorithms to be addictive. Social media use is correlated with more anxiety and depression and less sleep for young people. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s 2024 call for a warning label on social media was grounded in real concerns from health officials.

However, some data captures the positive impact social media can have on mental health in the right contexts. The social connection teenagers find online has been proven to positively impact their quality of life. For kids who struggle to connect, the online space can provide a lower-stakes way to practice socializing. Youth in marginalized communities might use social media as their only place for safe relationships. Fascinatingly, Instagram specifically has been proven to improve life satisfaction when used appropriately.

With both the exact dangers of social media and its potential positives still fairly nebulous, it’s unclear if these safety measures will be effective — or even how that would be measured.

As a result, skeptics have labeled the teen account roll-out as more a PR measure than an actual commitment to safety. Concerningly, paying lip service to higher security measures while really putting the onus back on parents might allow Instagram’s parent company Meta to keep disavowing responsibility for their platform. 

“It’s their latest attempt to avoid actual independent oversight and regulation and instead continue to self-regulate, jeopardizing the health, safety, and privacy of young people,” Nicole Gill, the co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Accountable Tech, told AP. “Today’s PR exercise falls short of the safety by design and accountability that young people and their parents deserve and only meaningful policy action can guarantee. Meta’s business model is built on addicting its users and mining their data for profit; no amount of parental and teen controls Meta is proposing will change that.”

She’s not alone in that critique. Longtime researcher Philip Mai weighed in as well, pointing out that these measures are easily circumvented. 

“This is a long time coming, and I’m glad they’re rolling out something like this. But as always, with a new feature like this, the devil is in the details,” he warned.

Specifically, the devil is in the details of implementation. Few teens have the kind of trusting relationship with a parent where they would consider consenting to these kinds of controls. They can also simply create other hidden accounts or find ways to fool the A.I. verification tools. 

“On other platforms, age restrictions were almost universally ignored,” Dr. Shannon Bennett, the center for youth mental health at NewYork-Presbyterian, told CNBC. 

For example, 20 million U.S. teens currently use Snapchat. Only 400,000 have linked their accounts to their parents’. That means only about 2% of teenagers on Snapchat are using the tools designed for them. There is no reason to believe that the rate of adoption on Instagram will be any better.

Many experts believe that the only real way to make Instagram safer for teenagers is for the platform itself to take action, rather than expecting parents to bear the brunt of safety considerations. This is especially true in households where parents are not able to be true sources of support. 

“I think [these features] definitely could lead to a lot of problems, especially for young people in abusive households who may require them to have these parentally supervised accounts, and young people who are exploring their identities. In already-problematic situations, it could raise the risk for young people,” Jason Kelley with the Electronic Frontier Foundation told NPR.

“It’s actually not the parents’ job to make sure that the content for kids is safe,” Arturo Béjar, a former consultant for Meta who testified before Congress, said in an interview with the Washington Post. “I think it is Instagram’s job.”

In the right households, Instagram teen accounts could be a way to build trust between parents and kids, especially when combined with healthy relationships that encourage openness and judgment-free conversations about tech habits. But it absolutely does not absolve Meta of the harm they have already done. It also does not change the fact that they need more stringent content moderation and an algorithm overhaul to prove that they actually do care about people — not just profit.

The security features in Instagram’s new teen accounts may serve as a good starting point. But they are just that: a start. Continued policy-level change is needed to truly ensure that digital platforms are promoting youth well-being to the absolute best of their ability.