Instagram said Tuesday that the platform is introducing its teen accounts feature, which has extra protective measures for safety for users in India, one of its biggest markets with over 350 million users.
The company introduced Teen Accounts last year in The U.S., U.K, Canada, and Australia. Meta migrated accounts of Instagram users who are under the age of 16 to these new types of accounts with default restrictions. These teen accounts are private accounts by default and have messaging restrictions, content controls, interaction limits, time limit reminders, and sleep mode.
“At Meta, creating a safer and more responsible digital environment is a top priority. With the expansion of Instagram Teen Accounts to India, we are strengthening protections, enhancing content controls, and empowering parents while ensuring a safer experience for teens,” Natasha Jog, Director of Public Policy India at Instagram, said in a blog post.
The teen account setup means that users under 16 will need the permission of parents or guardians to change some settings in their accounts. Plus, parents of users over 16 will also have an option to turn on the supervision of the teen’s account.
Parents can see who their children are interacting with, but they can’t see the message. They can also set daily usage limits and block the app during specific hours.
On the content level, Meta only allows users to get messages from people they are connected to. For the connected people criteria, the company considers if the sender is friends with the receiver on any of the Meta platforms or if they have interacted on DMs before but don’t follow each other. Teens can also be tagged by only the people they follow.
Meta is also filtering out offensive words and phrases from a teen’s account automatically. Plus, the company is removing content like fighting or promotion of cosmetics products from the explore page and in Reels. Teens can select topics like Soccer, Crafts, Dance, Music & Audio, Cats, Food & Drink, and Computer Science to retune their Explore page and show content related to the selected categories.
Meta said that it is also using methods like ID verification and recording video selfies for user age verifications, as teens often lie about their age on various platforms.
Last month, India released draft rules related to its data protection law and outlined that companies can’t process data of users 18 with verifiable parental consent. Platforms might need to have additional protection measures if these rules are finalized.
