Instagram starts showing less sensitive content for teenagers’ profiles
SAN FRANCISCO — Meta on Tuesday announced new safety features to limit potentially harmful content shown to teens on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, in the first major policy change since the company was found responsible in March for harming a young girl with the design of its platforms.
The new features will limit how often teens see posts about topics such as nutrition, bodybuilding and anxiety in their feeds, Meta said, expanding a broader safety effort for this audience announced in October.
This type of content “can be useful, but needs to be balanced with other types of content, and not displayed repeatedly,” Meta said in a statement. “That’s why we’re testing ways to stop teens from seeing too many of these types of posts at once.”
In October, Meta launched a content rating system on Instagram inspired by the age groups used in films; now this system is being expanded to teens on Facebook and Messenger. Hundreds of millions of teenagers use Meta apps, which also include WhatsApp, every day.
The changes are part of the Teen Accounts program, created in 2024, which automatically made the profiles of teenage users private and gave parents more control over their children’s accounts.
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Meta has faced questions about child safety for more than a decade, but is under increasing pressure because of thousands of lawsuits filed by parents, state attorneys general and school districts — two of which it recently lost.
In March, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and YouTube responsible for harming a young woman with features like infinite scrolling and beauty filters. The same month, a jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million for violating state consumer protection laws, including facilitating sexual exploitation, in a lawsuit brought by the state attorney general.
Meta said on Tuesday it worked with Alice, an organization dedicated to online trust and safety, to measure the effectiveness of its policies. The company also stated that it asked parents to evaluate millions of content to help calibrate its moderation system.
In October, Meta had also announced security policies related to artificial intelligence chatbots, amid growing concerns that the technology was harming young users. In January, the company blocked the ability for teenagers to send messages to Instagram’s AI characters, which are chatbots with different personalities.
Now, conversations between teenagers and the Meta AI chatbot will have the same types of content restrictions as the company’s “cinema style” rating system.
