New year, new Instagram. Since the start of January 2025, Instagram has been automatically making all accounts under the age of 18 a “teen account”. The teen accounts will have all sorts of new features with the goal of protecting teenagers online. While most settings can be turned off (with parent permission), are any of them really necessary?
The biggest and most noticeable change is that teen accounts are all private. Teens can change this setting, but teenagers under 16 need parent permission to make the change, leaving a lot of the control of the account to parents.
“I think keeping it private, keeping it something where it’s small and it’s just my friends as a way to link up and chat is really the main purpose at that age,” FHS math teacher Bradley Scholten said.
There has always been an optional time limit on Instagram for parents to monitor their child’s usage, but it is now an automatic part of the teen accounts. After one hour on the app a reminder will pop up urging teens to close the app. The time limit is really only a suggestion though, as it can be ignored and users can continue to scroll.
“It’s completely useless honestly because you can turn it off anytime you want,” FHS senior Mu Ran Qi said. “And for [the] daily limit, I’ve seen it pop up multiple times on my phone and I just ignore the limit for the day.”
The main goal of these teen accounts is to keep teenagers safe, which of course means parents can monitor what they do on the app all the time. While parents are not able to see what their child is saying, they can see who they have messaged in the last seven days, and control who they can and cannot message.
“You would hope one of two things is that the child has enough internet intelligence to sort of be able to do that on their own, like self monitor,” Scholten said. “And you hope that parents aren’t abusing these settings in some sort of way as well.”
To protect teens from online haters and negative comments there is a comment filter that can hide comment types of users’ choosing. Teens can request to hide certain words in the comment section of your posts and on Instagram’s sister app, Threads. However, as with any other feature, parents have to allow teens to unfilter comments.
Instagram is giving parents a lot of control over their kids’ accounts and usage. Social media is one way for teens to express themselves and connect with others, but having a parent over your shoulder at all times is sometimes just an invasion of privacy.
Lots of teens use social media to escape from their parents and connect with other people their age with the same interests. When parents disturb that, teens might just switch to other platforms.
The hope of Teen Accounts is to keep teenagers safe online, so they can enjoy platforms without worry. Even though some of the new features are a little controlling and invasive, the intentions of the features are in the right place.
