Meta is putting Instagram users under the age of 18 into new “teen accounts” to allow parents greater control over their activities, including the ability to block children from viewing the app at night.
In an announcement made a week after the Australian government proposed restricting children from accessing such platforms, Meta says it is launching teen accounts for Instagram that will apply to new users. The setting will then be extended to existing accounts held by teenagers over time.
Changes under the teen account setting include giving parents the ability to set daily time limits for using the app, block teens from using Instagram at certain times, see the accounts their child is messaging and viewing the content categories they are viewing.
Teenagers signing up to Instagram are already placed by default into the strictest privacy settings, which include barring adults from messaging teens who don’t follow them and muting notifications at night.
However, under the new “teen account” feature users under the age of 16 will now need parental permission to change those settings, while 16-18 year olds defaulted into the new features will be able to change them independently. Once an under-16 tries to change their settings, the parental supervision features will allow adults to set new time limits, block access at night and view who their child is exchanging messages with.
It came after the Australian government last week announced plans to introduce legislation to parliament by the end of the year to raise the age children can access social media up to an as-yet-undefined age between 14 and 16.
But unlike other actions the company has taken recently – including by allowing EU users to opt-out of having their data used to train its AI model but not offering a similar option in Australia – Meta’s move is global and will apply to the US, UK and Canada as well as Australia.
Meta’s director of global safety, Antigone Davis, said that the decision to introduce teen accounts was driven by parents and not by any government legislation or proposals.
“Parents everywhere are thinking about these issues,” Davis told Guardian Australia.
“The technology at this point is pretty much ubiquitous, and parents are thinking about it. From the perspective of youth safety, it really does make the most sense to be thinking about these kinds of things globally and addressing parents concerns globally.”
Davis did not rule out bringing the changes to Facebook in the future but said the company would examine what measures could make sense for different apps.
The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said the key motivator for the policy to raise the age teenagers can access social media was to have them having “real experiences”.
“Well what we want to [do] is to get our kids off their devices and on to the footy fields or the netball courts, to get them interacting with real people, having real experiences,” he told Channel Seven’s Sunrise program. “And we know that social media is doing social harm.”
But Davis said teenagers would view social media as also providing “real” experiences for them.
“For the teen who plays soccer and is on the soccer team and is trying to perfect a particular kick or a particular pass, they’re going to use social media to figure that out, and in a way that we might not have done, and in some ways that’s the real value,” she said.
“I think they move much more fluidly through these apps and their online and offline world. I don’t think they make this that separation.”
If the Australian proposal goes ahead, the country could be one of the first to bring a ban into effect. The UK technology secretary, Peter Kyle, last week said he was keeping a close eye on how the Australian model may work and had an open mind about whether the UK may follow in the future.
Existing private accounts settings for teens that will be switched to the new teen account feature include u-18s needing to accept new followers, being placed into the most sensitive content restrictions and filtering out offensive words and phrases in posts and messages.
The changes also come after Nick Clegg, a senior executive at Instagram’s parent, Meta, said parents don’t use parental supervision features.
“One of the things we do find … is that even when we build these controls, parents don’t use them,” he said last week.