Instagram makes teen accounts private; watchdog group hails ‘major victory’
Instagram has announced that it's making the accounts of teenagers private in an attempt to make the social media platform safer.
In an announcement Tuesday, the platform said it was introducing what it calls “Instagram Teen Accounts,” with the privacy measures being made “to reassure parents that teens are having safe experiences with built-in protections on automatically.”
“Teen Accounts have built-in protections which limit who can contact them and the content they see, and also provide new ways for teens to explore their interests,” stated Instagram.
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“We’ll automatically place teens into Teen Accounts, and teens under 16 will need a parent’s permission to change any of these settings to be less strict.”
The platform added that it “understand[s] parents’ concerns” and made the changes “to better support parents, and give them peace of mind that their teens are safe with the right protections in place.”
In addition to making teenaged profiles private, Instagram will also restrict message settings so that it can only be contacted by people they know, prohibit exposure to “sensitive content,” and only allow them to be mentioned or tagged in posts by people they follow.
Additionally, Instagram will implement a “sleep mode” from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. so that teenagers won't receive notifications during that time, they will also get a notification telling them to exit the app if they spend more than an hour on it.
“These protections are turned on automatically, and parents decide if teens under 16 can change any of these settings to be less strict,” Instagram continued.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which has been critical of Instagram’s lack of protections for minors in the past, hailed the changes as a “major victory” that “can’t be overstated.”
“Instagram is the #1 platform where sextortion happens. It is being used by millions of teens worldwide. 68% of U.S. teens 15-17 and 59% of teens 13-17 say they use Instagram. Now, all these children are better protected from sexual exploitation,” explained NCOSE.
“We are grateful to Instagram for giving parents more power to keep their children safe, and even more grateful that they are automating settings to keep all children safe.”
NCOSE speculated that the advancement of the Kids Online Safety Act in Congress might have inspired Instagram to make the changes, as the proposed legislation recently passed the Senate and is making its way through the House.
Nicole Gil, the co-founder and executive director of Accountable Tech, was more critical of Instagram's announcement, believing that it and parent company Meta still needed “actual independent oversight and regulation” to better protect minors.
“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,” said Gil, as quoted by The Associated Press.
“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.”
In recent years, Meta has faced criticism and litigation alleging that it doesn't protect children from predators and abuse on its social media platforms, including Instagram and Facebook.
Earlier this year, NCOSE placed Meta on its “Dirty Dozen List,” arguing that the social media company’s platforms “have consistently been ranked for years as the top hotspots for a host of crimes and harms: pedophile networks sharing child sex abuse material, where CSAM offenders first contact children, exploitative algorithms promoting children to adults, sex trafficking, sextortion, and image-based sexual abuse.”
