The Intervention Journey A Roadmap to Effective Digital Safety Measures 2025

Design Teen Account protections are designed to address parents’ biggest concerns, including who their teens are talking to online, the content they are seeing and whether their time is being well spent. While Teen Accounts put new protections in place automatically, many parents want to be even more involved in their teens’ experiences, so the launch of Teen Accounts also comes with new additional elements beyond Instagram’s current supervision feature. Designed with parental support in mind, Teen Accounts are designed to automatically apply baseline protection settings for all teens so parents can feel assured that their teens’ experiences on Instagram are protected. Parents are concerned that their teens might see mature or inappropriate content online, which is why Meta has stricter rules around the kinds of content teens see. Meta’s Community Standards and Community Guidelines outline what is allowed and not allowed on Facebook and Instagram respectively and are designed to protect the whole community – including teens – from harmful content. With Instagram Teen Accounts, teens are defaulted to the strictest setting of the platform’s sensitive content control. Teens under 16 cannot change this setting without a parent’s permission. Teens may try to circumvent these new protections, which is why they must verify their age. Since 2022, Meta has required teens to prove their age through a video selfie or ID check if they attempt to change their birthday from under the age of 18 to over 18. AI technology will be used to predict if someone is over or under the age of 18. Meta trained this technology with signals like profile information, when a person’s account was created and interactions with other profiles and content. From those signals, calculations can begin to be made about the likelihood of whether someone is an adult or a teen, even if a teen has listed an adult birthday on their account. Implementation Teens who sign up for Instagram are automatically placed into Teen Accounts, and existing teens already using Instagram were notified and shifted into Teen Accounts within 60 days of launch.Parents decide if teens under 16 can change any of these settings to be less strict: –Private accounts: With default private accounts, teens need to accept new followers and people who do not follow them cannot see their content or interact with them. This applies to all teens under 16 and teens under 18 when they sign up for the app. –Messaging restrictions: Teens will be placed in the strictest messaging settings, so they can only be messaged by people they follow or are already connected to. –Sensitive content restrictions: Teens will automatically be placed into the most restrictive setting of sensitive content control, which limits the type of sensitive content teens see in places like the explore and reels pages. –Limited interactions: Teens can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow. Hidden words are also activated so that offensive words and phrases will be filtered out of teens’ comments and DM requests. –Time limit reminders: Teens will get notifications telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day. –Sleep mode enabled: Sleep mode will be turned on between 10pm and 7am, muting notifications overnight and sending auto-replies to direct messages. If parents want more oversight over their older teens’ (16 and over) experiences, they simply have to turn on parental supervision. Then, they can approve any changes to these settings, including: –Get insights into who their teens are chatting with while not being allowed to read their teens’ messages –Set total daily time limits for teens’ Instagram use –Block teens from using Instagram for specific time periods –See topics their teen is looking at The launch of Teen Accounts was accompanied by a launch event with parent creators, as well as media campaigns to reach parenting and consumer audiences. The primary goal was focused on raising awareness of the resource. Ensuring families know about and understand Teen Accounts is key to promoting safer online experiences for teens. With Instagram Teen Accounts, teens are defaulted to the strictest setting of the platform’s sensitive content control. The Intervention Journey: A Roadmap to Effective Digital Safety Measures 21