Today, we’re announcing that Instagram Teen Accounts will be guided by PG-13 movie ratings by default. This means that teens will see content on Instagram that’s similar to what they’d see in a PG-13 movie. Teens under 18 will be automatically placed into an updated 13+ setting, and they won’t be able to opt out without a parent’s permission. And because we know that all families are different, we’re also introducing a new, stricter setting for parents who prefer a more restrictive experience for their teen. We invited thousands of parents worldwide to share their feedback with us, helping us shape these changes and ensure our efforts align with their expectations.
This is the most significant update to Teen Accounts since we introduced them last year, and builds on the automatic protections already provided by Teen Accounts to hundreds of millions of teens globally. We know teens may try to avoid these restrictions, which is why we’ll use age prediction technology to place teens into certain content protections — even if they claim to be adults.
Just like you might see some suggestive content or hear some strong language in a PG-13 movie, teens may occasionally see something like that on Instagram — but we’re going to keep doing all we can to keep those instances as rare as possible. We recognize no system is perfect, and we’re committed to improving over time. We hope this update reassures parents that we’re working to show teens safe, age-appropriate content on Instagram by default, while also giving them more ways to shape their teen’s experience.
Updating Our Content Policies for Teens, Guided by PG-13 Ratings
Teen Accounts were already designed to protect teens from inappropriate content and, over the past year, we’ve further refined our age-appropriate guidelines to hide even more potentially inappropriate content in the updated default 13+ content setting.
We decided to more closely align our policies with an independent standard that parents are familiar with, so we reviewed our age-appropriate guidelines against PG-13 movie ratings and updated them accordingly. While of course there are differences between movies and social media, we made these changes so teens’ experiences in the 13+ setting feel closer to the Instagram equivalent of watching a PG-13 movie.
In addition to our longstanding policies — which already hide or prohibit the recommendation of sexually suggestive content, graphic or disturbing images, and adult content like tobacco or alcohol sales from teens — our updated policies will now go even further. This includes hiding or not recommending posts with strong language, certain risky stunts, and additional content that could encourage potentially harmful behaviors, such as posts showing marijuana paraphernalia.
In a recent survey conducted by Ipsos and commissioned by Meta, 95% of US parents of teens said they think these updated settings will be helpful, and 90% said they’ll make it easier to understand the kind of content their teen is likely to see on Instagram.
Expanding Protections Across Teen Accounts
We spent several months improving and refining our technology to proactively identify content that goes against our updated guidelines, and we’re using this improved technology across Instagram, including:
- Accounts: Teens will no longer be able to follow accounts that we’ve found regularly share age-inappropriate content, or if their name or bio suggests the account is inappropriate for teens. If teens already follow these accounts, they’ll no longer be able to see or interact with their content, send them DMs, or see their comments under anyone’s posts. We won’t recommend these accounts to teens, and we’ll make it harder for teens to find these accounts in Search. These protections work both ways: these accounts won’t be able to follow teens, send them DMs, or comment on their posts.
- Search: We already block search terms related to certain sensitive topics, like suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders. Now we’ll block teens’ ability to see content results for a wider range of mature search terms, such as ‘alcohol’ or ‘gore’— and we’re working to make sure these terms will still be blocked if they’re misspelled.
- Content Experience: Teens shouldn’t see content that goes against our updated guidelines in recommendations (Explore, Reels, and in-Feed), Feed, and Stories — even when shared by someone they follow — or comments. If someone sends a teen a link to such content in DMs, they won’t be able to open it.
- AI: We’ve also updated our AI experiences for teens to be guided by PG-13 ratings by default, meaning AIs should not give age-inappropriate responses that would feel out of place in a PG-13 movie.
Introducing Limited Content: A New, Stricter Setting for Parents Who Prefer Extra Controls
Every family is different and, for some parents, PG-13 movies may still feel too mature for their teen. That’s why we’re introducing a new, stricter setting called ‘Limited Content,’ which will filter even more content from the Teen Account experience. It will also remove teens’ ability to see, leave, or receive comments under posts. Starting next year, this setting will also further restrict the AI conversations teens can have.
The new Limited Content setting is designed to give parents more control over what their teen sees on Instagram. 96% of US parents said they appreciated having this option, whether they choose to opt their teen in or not.
Listening and Responding to Parents
We took parent feedback into account as we developed these changes, and we’re giving parents ways to continue providing us with feedback so we can make improvements. We invited thousands of parents around the world to rate real Instagram content and tell us if they thought it was appropriate for teens. We received over 3 million content ratings from parents and incorporated this feedback when refining our age-appropriate guidelines.
We’re encouraged to see that this feedback, and the changes we made in response to it, made parents more comfortable with content recommended to teens. For example, in September, we asked parents in the US and UK to review Instagram content that had been recommended to teens. Fewer than 2% of the posts were considered inappropriate for teens by most parents.
So parents can continue to give us feedback, we’ll run regular surveys on Instagram inviting parents to review a series of posts, and confirm whether they think they’re appropriate for teens. These surveys will help us understand if parents still agree with where we’ve drawn the line, and if we need to further adjust our guidelines.
We’re also testing a new way for parents using supervision tools to flag any post they see on Instagram that they think should be hidden from teens and tell us why. If these posts aren’t already hidden from teens, we’ll send them to our teams for prioritized review, and we’ll let the parent know the outcome.
When to Expect These Changes
These are significant updates, and we want to take the time to get it right. The updated content settings will start rolling out gradually to Teen Accounts in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada today and will be fully rolled out by the end of the year. Looking ahead, we plan to roll out these changes globally, apply more of the new protections to teens who claim to be adults, and on Facebook, add additional age-appropriate content protections for teens.
