Instagram is stepping up its teen safety push, expanding its Teen Account protections to Canada after an earlier U.S. rollout. The new safeguards, powered by AI, automatically shift accounts that appear to belong to users under 18, regardless of the birthday listed, into restricted Teen settings.
The latest update aims to reduce exposure to unwanted contact and filter inappropriate content, part of the platform's broader effort to make social media safer for young users.
How Instagram Teen Accounts Work
According to Android Central, Teen Account settings restrict who can message younger users and filter out explicit or damaging content from their feeds. Although Instagram acknowledges its AI is not perfect, the system is programmed to err on the side of safety. If an adult is accidentally flagged, they can readily change their settings and confirm their age.
The platform will ensure that most under-18 users are in a safer online environment without needing to tweak settings by hand.
Parents Get More Support
Instagram's approach goes beyond AI. Canadian parents will soon receive notifications with expert advice, crafted with pediatric psychologist Dr. Ann-Louise Lockhart, to help them guide teens in sharing accurate birthdays online and foster honest, supportive conversations about digital safety.
The social media app stresses that precise input of age is important for its protection to be effective. If the teens provide their actual ages, the system can put measures in place better.
Adoption and Parental Confidence
Nearly 54 million teenagers across the globe are actively using Teen Accounts, with 97% of users between 13 and 15 years old having left the protections on. Parent surveys also indicate that over 90% of parents think these features assist, but many still feel bogged down by the task of controlling what their children see online.
By pairing AI-powered protections with direct parental intervention, Instagram hopes to close that gap and provide parents with greater assurance in the platform's safety features.
The firm recognizes that age verification continues to be a big industry challenge. Misrepresentation is still conceivable, but Instagram is trying to make it harder by syncing up its own AI with parental monitoring and app store age checks.
Paired with the location-sharing update last August, Instagram is becoming a safe place for interaction. Still, parents need to supervise what content their teens are consuming.
In the latest round of Meta's updates, the tech giant rolled out Community Notes to improve its fact-checking feature not only on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.
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