Instagram introduces teen accounts with parental controls

Instagram has introduced Teen Accounts which it claims will provide parents with more control and protection over what their children are exposed to online.

The accounts have built-in protections which limit who can contact young users of the app and the content that they see.

Instagram said it will automatically place teens under the age of 16 into Teen Accounts and they will need a parent’s permission to change any settings.

This means that the accounts will automatically default to private, so nobody other than those accepted to follow the accounts can message or see posts made by the users. It will also mean teens can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow.

Instagram will also limit the type of sensitive content teens see within areas of the app which presents teens with content by users they do not follow, such as ‘Explore’ and ‘Reels.’

It will also remind teens to leave the app after an hour, and mute notifications between 10 PM and 7 AM for ‘Sleep mode’.

Content posted on Instagram and its effect on a user’s mental health has caused controversy. In 2021, beauty cosmetics brand Lush chose to quit the platform, as well as Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat, in protest of “overwhelming evidence” that the algorithms are harming customers’ mental health.

While platforms such as Instagram originally presented a chronological home page of content, since TikTok and its ‘For You’ page algorithm gained popularity over the last few years, others have followed in its footsteps.

This meant that Instagram’s ‘Explore’ and ‘Reels’ sections prioritised content in users’ feeds, even by accounts they do not follow, based on factors such as engagement, relationships, relevancy, and timeliness.

Since then, Instagram has also announced an AI that can recognise posts with graphic content which it says will then take action on, or flag it for moderators to review – such as removing it from the platform or reducing its distribution.