Instagram is extending its “Teen Accounts” feature to India, seeking to enhance the online safety of its young users.
This move — on the Safer Internet Day — comes in response to mounting concerns over cyberbullying and privacy risks.
Natasha Jog, Director, Public Policy India at Instagram, emphasized, “We are strengthening protections, enhancing content controls, and empowering parents, while ensuring a safer experience for teens.”
Teen Accounts enforce multiple protective measures by default. New and existing accounts for users under 16 are automatically set to private, requiring approval for new followers and restricting message exchanges to known contacts.
The feature also employs the strictest available settings for sensitive content in areas like Explore and Reels, thus minimizing teens’ exposure to harmful material such as violent or age-inappropriate content.
Parental supervision gets a significant boost too, with tools allowing parents to monitor recent contacts, dictate screen-time limits, and enforce usage restrictions during specified hours.
Further efforts to prevent age misrepresentation involve more robust verification processes to ensure that users comply with age restrictions — designed to thwart attempts by younger users to bypass age boundaries.
Teen accounts where first rolled out to the U.S. in September last year. Whether they have made the experience actually safer for teens is up for debate. For starters, it is simple for a teen to bypass this process by lying about their age when creating the platform.
Meta’s own research in 2021 found teens face some complex issues when using Instagram, including teen girls who feared using the social media made their body image issues worse.
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