Instagram unveiled a sweeping overhaul Tuesday aimed at strengthening privacy and limiting the intrusive effects of social media for users under 18, as the app faces growing pressure over children’s online safety.
Instagram has announced that accounts for users under the age of 18 will be made private by default in the coming weeks, meaning only followers approved by the account holder will be able to see their posts. The app, owned by Meta, also plans to stop sending notifications to minors from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. to encourage sleep. Additionally, Instagram will introduce more adult supervision tools, including a feature that lets parents see which accounts their teen has recently messaged.
Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s CEO, said the new settings and features are aimed at addressing parents’ main concerns about their children online, including inappropriate contact, inappropriate content and too much screen time.
“We decided to focus on what parents think, because they know better what’s appropriate for their kids than any tech company, any private company, any senator, any policymaker, any staffer or any regulator,” he said in an interview. Instagram’s new initiative, called “Teen Accounts,” was designed to “essentially default” minors to an age-appropriate experiencem on the app, he said.
The changes are one of the most ambitious steps taken by an app to combat teen use of social media, as young people’s online experiences come under increased scrutiny. In recent years, parent and child groups have warned that Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and other apps have routinely exposed children and teens to bullying, pedophilia, sexual extortion and content promoting self-harm and eating disorders.
In June, Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, called for cigarette-like labels on social media to warn of potential mental health risks. And in July, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill called the Kids Online Safety Act to impose safety and privacy requirements for children and teens on social media.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has been particularly criticized for the risks social media poses to young people. Dozens of state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against his company, accusing Meta — which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp — of deliberately luring children to its apps while downplaying the risks. At a congressional hearing on child online safety in January, lawmakers urged Mr. Zuckerberg to apologize to families whose children had committed suicide after social media abuse.
“I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through,” Zuckerberg told the families at the hearing.
It’s unclear whether Instagram’s changes will be effective. Meta has promised to protect minors from inappropriate contact and content since at least 2007, when state attorneys general warned that Facebook was rife with sexually explicit content and had allowed adults to solicit teens. Since then, Meta has introduced tools, features and settings to promote youth well-being on its social networks, with varying degrees of success.
In 2021, for example, Instagram announced that it would make new accounts opened by people who indicated they were under 16 private by default. At the time, the app allowed younger teens to simply switch to public accounts by default.
This time around, 16- and 17-year-olds will be able to turn off the default privacy settings themselves. But Instagram said users under 16 will now need a parent’s permission to make their account publicly visible.
Dr. Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin Medical School who studies teens and problematic social media use, said Instagram’s new default settings for young people are “significant.”
“They raise the bar for confidentiality and privacy, and they take some of the burden off the shoulders of teens and their parents,” she said.
But these changes don’t directly address a glaring problem: young people lying about their age when they sign up for Instagram. The new settings and features are set to automatically enable themselves for account holders who identify themselves as minors. And while Instagram’s terms of service prohibit children under 13 from using the app, “Teen Accounts” isn’t designed to find and remove underage users.
Instagram said it removes underage accounts as soon as it becomes aware of them. It added that it will require teens to verify their age if they try to circumvent the new privacy defaults by creating new accounts with an adult birthdate. The company is also working on technology that would allow it to proactively find teens who have created accounts pretending to be adults.
While the overhaul is welcomed by parents, some teens, who make up a significant portion of Instagram’s user base, may be less pleased. Teen influencers who keep their accounts public to gain new followers may balk at the changes. Nearly half of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 use Instagram at least once a day, according to a Pew Research survey last fall, making it the fourth most popular social network among American youth, after YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat.
These security measures could hurt Meta’s business in the short term, as the company needs new users to grow and younger users to stay relevant. But by making these changes now, Instagram is also trying to appeal to the next generation of young people who will use social media while trying to reduce the risks they may face online.
Mr. Mosseri acknowledged that the new security measures could affect Meta’s financial results and its popularity among teenagers.
“It’s certainly going to be detrimental to adolescent growth and engagement, and there’s a lot of risk,” he said. “But fundamentally, I want us to be willing to take risks, move forward and make progress.”
Other social media apps have also made changes for younger users. In 2021, TikTok made accounts private by default for users ages 13 to 15. It also disabled direct messages for younger teens.
Instagram’s new settings and features will roll out starting Tuesday. New accounts registered by people who identify as minors will automatically be put into private mode. The app also said it will soon begin making existing accounts of minors in the United States, Canada, Australia and Britain private.
Meta said it would continue to restrict teens’ ability to send direct messages to people they don’t already follow on Instagram. The company also said it would show them less content in the main Instagram feed from people they don’t follow and prevent them from being tagged by the accounts of others they aren’t connected to.
The new options allow parents who supervise their teens’ accounts to better understand how their children use the apps, Instagram said. This includes a feature that lets parents see the topics of posts their child has chosen to see more of, as well as the accounts of people their child has recently messaged. To protect user privacy, however, parents will not be able to see the content of their children’s messages.
While parents can use this information to start important conversations with their children, experts said the feature could also create tension among vulnerable teens whose political views or gender identities may conflict with their parents’ views.
Dr. Moreno, who is also co-medical director of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, said she’s looking forward to seeing teens’ reactions to the Instagram changes. Many young people may be relieved that their accounts are now private, she noted, while others may find it too burdensome to get a parent’s permission to change the default settings.
“Their voices will be really important in determining how significant these changes are,” she said.
Mr. Mosseri said developing the new features was tricky for the company, as it tried to balance security concerns with personal privacy.
“What concerns me about this whole world of online safety, well-being and social media is that there are trade-offs,” he said. “We think we’ve struck a good balance. But I’m sure we’re going to get a lot of feedback.”
