In September of last year Meta has already announced the ‘teenagers’ for Instagram, a measure to protect the safety of the youngest. Throughout 2025, all adolescent accounts will incorporate integrated protections that will make their profiles private as standard, to limit who can contact them and observe the content they share. Now, among the new protection measures (which are also going to extend to Messenger and Facebook), is the prohibition of making all 16 years of age who do not have the permission of their parents.
But in addition to the veto to the direct ones, adolescents will also have an image filter in direct messages that cannot be deactivated. This filter blurs the images if you consider them suspicious content, and as with live transmissions, parents will be required to modify it.
The idea of these restrictions is to prevent adolescents from being exposed to malicious people and inappropriate content. In this way, parents can have more options to restrict, if they wish, the activity and content to which adolescents are exposed on Instagram. Adam Mosseri, director of the social network, said in a video posted on his Instagram account that the goal is to offer more tools to parents, and that they are the ones who decide what is best for their children.
The new filters of the ‘teenagers’ accounts
Goal
Another new measure is that only followers who are also teenagers can see and answer the stories; and the labels, mentions and comments will be limited in turn to those people who follow or who are friends. The same will happen with the comments, which will be limited to the closest circle – and of the same age – of the child.
New minimum age and time limit reminders
There is another important aspect and has to do with the excessive use of social networks: adolescents will receive reminders after using the network per day and the silent mode will be activated by default at night.
Goal also expands the minimum age to use Instagram: now adolescents under 16 will not be able to enter the platform unless their parents give permission. This means that the social network has raised minimum age to create an account, which was previously 14 years old. The new age limit will allow, for example, to easily implement the next law of protection of minors in digital environments in which the Ministry of Youth and Childhood works.
According to Meta, since September, when they launched adolescents, 97% of users between 13 and 15 years in the United States use the social network with active restrictions, which allows them to have a safer experience. There are a total of 54 million accounts, a figure that will increase as deployed globally. For now, the measure is majority in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, but it is a matter of time that also arrives in Spain and other regions.
