Instagram Is Finally Doing Right by Teens
6 min read
Teenagers are said to live on their phones, and one of the places where they spend the most time is Instagram. For many years, the perception has been that they are totally unsupervised there, much to their detriment. That may be changing: Meta, which owns Instagram, announced today that teenagers who use the app will be subject to a slew of new restrictions, as well as increased parental oversight. Under the new policy, accounts made or owned by anyone under the age of 18 will have limited functionality by default—a bid, the company says, to give parents “peace of mind that their teens are safe with the right protections in place.”
These changes, many would argue, are long overdue. For years, people have worried about the effects that unfettered and unsupervised social-media use may have on young people—that these platforms may contribute to depression, anxiety, severe body-image issues, and even suicide risk. Meta has been under the microscope particularly since the former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen leaked a trove of internal documents in 2021, some of which had to do with the experiences of teens on Instagram and Facebook. Subsequently, Meta and other social-media companies were hit by a wave of lawsuits related to alleged damage that the platforms have done to adolescents; politicians on both the right and the left suggested it might be a good idea to require parental consent for children to use algorithmic feeds, or to prohibit social-media use for younger teenagers altogether. “Facebook is not interested in making significant changes to improve kids’ safety on their platforms,” Marsha Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee, said during one of Haugen’s congressional appearances. “At least, nothing that would result in losing eyeballs on posts or decreasing their ad revenue.”
Now Meta is trying to prove otherwise. The new safeguards will almost certainly make for a less engaging Instagram for minors. The new “Teen” accounts are private by default, meaning that their posts cannot be viewed by anyone who is not an approved follower, and they can receive messages only from accounts they follow “or are already connected to.” Teens will also receive prompts to close the app after 60 minutes of use, and their accounts will automatically be in “sleep mode,” which mutes notifications, from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. (The app would still be usable during these hours, however, and teens can choose to check their direct messages at any time.) Additionally, these accounts will be subject to Instagram’s “most restrictive” content filter by default, and those under 16 will be unable to change the setting without parental permission. (Meta already sets this filter for younger users, though until now, those users have been free to change it themselves.) In a press release, Meta notes that the filter should limit teens’ exposure to content showing “people fighting” or promoting “cosmetic procedures,” for example.
Some flexibility is built into the new system. Although Instagram will enroll all teenage users under 18 into this new program, those who are 16 and older can change their default settings—disabling sleep mode, say. (Quite obviously, teenagers could simply lie about their age when creating an account in the first place—more on that in a minute.) If younger teens want to make changes, they will have to add a parent or guardian through the app’s settings and make any tweak with their agreement. Separately, an expanded parental-supervision tool—which both parent and teen have to opt into—allows parents and guardians to see whom their teenager has messaged in the past seven days (though they can’t read the content of those messages), set daily time limits on the app (to be enforced with either a pop-up reminder or a hard shutdown), and block Instagram for preset periods during the day (such as school hours).
“On the face of it, it’s what a lot of people have advocated for a long time,” Candice L. Odgers, the associate dean for research and a professor of psychological science and informatics at UC Irvine, told me. (Earlier this year, Odgers wrote an article for The Atlantic about her research on children’s use of digital technology, which argued that extreme rhetoric about the supposed harmful effects of social media may be damaging in itself.) I gave her only a brief summary of Instagram’s update, details of which were not yet public when we spoke; she commented that the default settings may be the most significant development here. “For a long time, what we’ve said is it’s too much of an onus put on parents, adolescents, and caregivers,” she told me. “The closer we can get to safety by design … the better it’s going to be for everybody.”
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business and one of the most well-known and influential voices on the topic of teenage social-media use, has argued that these apps are out-and-out “dangerous” for young people. His latest book, titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, makes this argument at length and is a best seller. (Haidt is also a regular contributor to The Atlantic.) But even he saw today’s changes as a “big step in the right direction” and told me he is “very encouraged” by them. “Meta is the big fish,” he said. “For Meta to move first, I think, is a very good sign, and it’s likely to encourage other platforms to treat teens differently.” (He did qualify his optimism, saying that young people will probably still be on their phone way too much. But “at least it would remove some of the worst things, like being contacted by strange men.”)
Liza Crenshaw, a spokesperson on the youth and well-being team at Meta, told me that the company was focused on responding to feedback from parents when it created these features. “I don’t really know that we’re trying to solve for anything else other than what we hear from parents that they want,” she told me. She said the company had interviewed parents who had asked for more ways to be involved in their teens’ use of the app, and wanted to see safety features turned on by default.
Odgers praised that approach in theory, noting that as a parent herself, it’s better to have the most restrictive settings in place and then talk about lifting some of them over time and through negotiation. But, she added, “the devil is in the details.” The most obvious issue with Instagram’s new approach is age verification. The company has already experimented with using facial-analysis software to estimate users’ ages and apply some restrictions to younger users’ accounts. The next step is to use it to help them place accounts in the “Teen” category in situations where a younger teen may be trying to skirt restrictions. If the system thinks a user is lying about their age, it can ask them to verify their age with an ID or via a “facial estimation” tool, which involves an AI analysis of someone’s “biometric selfie.”
There are other wrinkles. To prevent a situation in which, for example, a 20-year-old signs up to be the parent-guardian giving permission for a dozen of their 16-year-old sibling’s friends to turn off restrictive settings, Meta says it will cap the number of accounts that one person can supervise. Crenshaw declined to be more specific about what that cap will be, saying that Meta won’t be sharing all of the ways it will combat circumvention of the parental-supervision tool. She also acknowledged that the company will have to be careful about not punishing teens who don’t have traditional parent-guardians in their life, but said she couldn’t give details on how Instagram will make these distinctions.
Still, many concerned parents may see these features as cause for celebration. Meta certainly does. This morning, the company is holding a three-hour announcement event at its New York office hosted by the actor Jessica Alba, and on Thursday night, there will be a party at Public Records, a popular music venue in Brooklyn. The celebrations could be in honor of the prevailing of common sense: Scientists broadly agree that there is enough evidence to cause concern about the relationship between social-media use and depression and anxiety, particularly among younger teenage girls. They have disagreed on what to do about it, but today’s measures represent a good-faith effort to do something.
