All teens using Instagram will automatically have strong restrictions applied, with the change expected to roll out over the next 60 days in a push by parent company Meta to protect children by default rather than putting the onus on parents to instigate controls.

The new “teen accounts” program, which Meta says is informed by extensive research taking in views from parents, teens and experts, is an expansion of the existing supervised accounts, except it will apply proactively to every user aged between 13 and 17.

Teen accounts are private, can only be messaged by established contacts, have the most restrictive content settings, have a 60-minute daily time limit and are inaccessible between 10pm and 7am. Users aged 16 or 17 can change some of these settings to be less restrictive if they choose, but younger teens will need a parent to set up supervision and approve any such changes. Once supervision is set up, parents also get access to certain information, including how often their child uses Instagram and who they message.

Adam Mosseri, Meta’s head of Instagram, said the program was designed to give peace of mind to the parents who ultimately control whether their kids are allowed on Instagram while also giving kids a safe experience that doesn’t feel too restrictive.

“We’ve tried wherever possible to find the overlap between what parents want and what teens want and lean into that. I’m sure there will some be some parents who think that we aren’t going far enough, and there’ll be some teens who think we’ve gone too far,” he said.

“But we want to make sure that we do all we can to keep Instagram safe for teens in a way that doesn’t require parents to do anything.”

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The change addresses an issue faced by many tech platforms, which often develop robust parental control or child safety mechanisms that end up being underutilised. Parents face an overwhelming task in initiating parental controls on every single app or device their children use, especially when they can’t be sure the kids won’t simply move to a different app.

Another obvious problem is that teen users can simply lie about their age to circumvent most restrictions. Mosseri said Meta was a strong advocate for apps being able to get age information from Apple and Google accounts to easily identify youngsters (“As an app developer, I can ask for access to your microphone, to your camera and to where in the world you are right now, I should be able to ask for day you were born”), but in lieu of that the company was developing AI solutions that would aim to sort through Instagram’s 2 billion users and detect teens pretending to be adults.