Instagram overhauls teen accounts with sweeping privacy, age-verification changes

The big picture: The company faces intense regulatory pressure around privacy and safety for younger users, but Instagram's head Adam Mosseri said the changes were a business decision.

• "I think over the long run, it's going to be in our interest as a business to earn more trust from parents," Mosseri told Axios in an interview. "Parents — at the end of the day — they get to make decisions."

Driving the news: Beginning this week, all teen accounts on Instagram in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia will be notified that Instagram plans to automatically place their accounts under new, protective settings that limit who can contact them and what content they can see. The changes will take effect within the next 60 days.

• The shift will take place in other countries beginning in January.
• Teens who sign up for Instagram moving forward will automatically have the new settings.

How it works: The new settings will apply to all teen accounts 18 and under, but teens 16 and under require parental permission to move to less restrictive settings.

• Instagram made a distinction between older teens (over 16) and younger teens (16 and under) in response to years of research with parents, academics, and other experts, Mosseri said.
• "It felt a little strange to have the exact same system for a 17-year-old, who can drive a car at night, and a 13-year-old, who can't see an R-rated movie without a parent," Mosseri said.

The fine print: To prevent teens from lying about their age to circumvent the new settings, Instagram will now require users to verify their age in new ways, such as via a government-issued ID or facial scans. Methods will vary depending on the country, Mosseri said.

• Teens and their parents or guardians have to mutually agree to supervisory relationships for a parent to access control over a teen's account. "We can't verify a parental relationship. There's no good way to do that at scale. So it can be another adult in your life," Mosseri said.

Zoom in: Teens' accounts will automatically be private, which means they can't be viewed without the account owner accepting a follower request.

• Stricter messaging settings will ensure they can only be messaged by people they follow or are already connected to. Offensive words and phrases will automatically be filtered from teens' direct messages and post comments.
• Teens will also be automatically placed in more restrictive content settings, which limit what they see from accounts they don't follow, as well as more restrictive interaction settings. Moving forward, teens can only be tagged or mentioned in posts by followers.

Between the lines: Instagram is doing more to encourage teens to take phone breaks. While efforts to limit screen time came mostly from parental feedback, other changes — like limiting unwanted outreach — were suggested by both teens and parents in Instagram's research.

• Teens will be encouraged via a prompt to close the app after 60 minutes. Teens over 16 have the option to extend the time between break prompts, but teens under 16 need permission to change those settings.
• Teen accounts will automatically be placed in a "sleep mode" between 10 pm and 7 am, which stops them from receiving notifications at night. Parents now have the option of limiting Instagram access from teens at night altogether or any other time period they choose.

Of note: The changes give parents more visibility into their teen's activity.

• Parents will be given tools to see who their child has been messaging, although they won't be able to see the messages themselves.
• They can also view their teen's content topics. (Instagram is giving teens the option to see more content based on a list of age-appropriate topics they can choose from.)

Reality check: Mosseri acknowledged that the new settings could create a stronger incentive for teens just to try to work around Instagram's age assurance systems. "We are proactively trying to prevent that in a number of different ways, but it is a challenge," he said.

• Instagram is testing artificial intelligence technology to proactively find accounts belonging to teens and automatically place the new restrictions on them, even if they list an adult birthday on their account.

State of play: The changes come as federal and state regulators eye laws that could force Instagram and other social media apps to introduce similar features anyway.

• Mosseri said Meta is advocating for regulation at the federal level, but argued compliance with individual state laws is "really rough."
• He also suggested device makers need to do more to assist with age verification. "I'm not trying to absolve us of any responsibility, but the real thing that needs to happen is Apple and Google need to provide birthdays in a privacy-safe way to apps if you really want to have a force multiplier on the safety work of all companies such as ours."

The bottom line: "The system isn't perfect," Mosseri said, "I think it's a huge step forward."

Go deeper: Facebook, Instagram will hide more sensitive content from teens, Meta says