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Instagram to test young people’s ingenuity with new restrictions for teens
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Instagram to test young people’s ingenuity with new restrictions for teens

Teens have long ruled the internet, but teen internet safety is all the rage right now. YouTube, Spotify and Snapchat have all recently introduced parental controls. Uber has an entire “Uber for Teens” campaign with grim ads about kids getting cut from the soccer team and texting their parents on the way home. Now Instagram has introduced mandatory “Teen Accounts” with built-in privacy protections.

Starting Tuesday, new users under the age of 18 will be automatically assigned to a Teen Account, while teens who already have an account will be migrated over the next 60 days. The new settings will automatically make teen accounts private instead of public; users under the age of 16 will need parental permission to switch to public accounts. On Teen Accounts, users will only be able to message people they follow, and there will be a setting that lets parents see who their teens are messaging. Teens will be able to choose “age-appropriate” topics for messages fed to them by the algorithm (which their parents will also be able to see), and all Teen Accounts will be put into “sleep mode,” limiting users’ access to the app from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.

Instagram’s Adam Mosseri announced teen accounts on Good morning America on Tuesday, saying the new facility is an attempt “to proactively address the biggest concerns we hear from parents about teens online. … Things like who can contact them, what content they see, and how much time they spend on their device … all without the parent having to be involved.”

It used to be easy enough for a teen to simply lie about their birthday to get around such a restriction, but Meta (which owns Instagram) is working on technology “that will try to identify age liars,” according to vice president and global head of safety Antigone Davis. Teens will be required to verify their age if they try to change the birth date on their account, and accounts with different birthdays on the same device will be blocked.

Will these changes address meaningful concerns about the toll social media is taking on teens’ mental health? Or will teens simply find new apps with fewer protections? It will be interesting to see whether this is a real tipping point for internet safety, or whether these new settings are just a band-aid solution.