Meta expands Instagram parental controls and brings them to Facebook
8 April 2025, 11:04
The tools mean the accounts of under-16s are heavily restricted by default and require parental permission to reduce them.
Under-16s will be unable to use Instagram’s live streaming feature without parental permission, part of an update to the site’s parental controls.
Meta said Instagram users under the age of 16 would need parental permission to turn off a feature which automatically blurs images suspected to contain nudity within direct messages (DMs).
The updates are an expansion of the social media giant’s Teen Accounts system, which it first introduced last September, and places any users under 16 into a Teen Account by default, which automatically makes an account private, reduces messaging capabilities and puts the user into the strictest category of Meta’s sensitive content settings.
The tech giant said it was also beginning to roll out Teen Accounts to both Facebook and Facebook Messenger.
Since September, it said around 54 million teenagers globally had been moved onto Teen Accounts, and that this figure would continue to grow as it expanded the availability of the settings.
“These are major updates that have fundamentally changed the experience for teens on Instagram,” Meta said in a blog post announcing the updates.
“We’re encouraged by the progress, but our work to support parents and teens doesn’t stop here, so we’re announcing additional protections and expanding Teen Accounts to Facebook and Messenger to give parents more peace of mind across Meta apps.
“We developed Teen Accounts with parents in mind, and introduced protections that were responsive to their top concerns.
“We’re continuing to listen to parents, and that includes conducting research to understand how they feel about the changes.”
Increasing regulation of social media is seeing platforms doing more to give parents and teenagers greater control over their safety experiences.
In the UK, the Online Safety Act is steadily coming into force, requiring the biggest tech platforms to make more action to prevent users, and particularly children, from encountering illegal or harmful content.
Meta has also come in for criticism in recent months, after founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced in January that the site was “getting rid” of third-party fact-checkers and replacing them with user-generated community notes in the name “free expression” – because fact-checkers were “politically biased”.
At the time, the tech giant said it was also cutting back on pro-actively moderating content on certain topics to “reduce censorship”.
A number of online safety experts, campaigners, and charities have warned that the move – which is starting in the US first – will lead to young people encountering more harmful content.
At the time, Mr Zuckerberg himself said the changes would mean Meta would catch “less bad stuff”.
