Meta rolls out new protections for teen accounts across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger

Meta on Wednesday announced a package of updates aimed at strengthening protections for teens across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, including expanded “13+” controls, new parental notifications and additional approaches to detect accounts that appear to be underage.

The company said the rollout is designed to improve age-appropriate experiences by default, while also giving parents more visibility into their teen’s online activity. Meta framed the announcement as part of an ongoing effort to keep teens safer, citing safeguards that span both account setting defaults and systems intended to identify underage accounts before they can cause harm.

A central element of the update is the expansion of Teen Accounts settings that Meta says were previously introduced in India and are now being rolled out globally. On Instagram, Meta described the global expansion of its age-appropriate “13+ content” settings for Teen Accounts. The company also said these settings were introduced in India recently and are now being made available across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.

For Facebook, Meta said a new 13+ default setting is designed to hide content it considers inappropriate for teens in areas such as Feed and Reels. It also said the setting limits teens’ ability to interact with Profiles, Pages, Groups and Events that primarily post content Meta says is inappropriate for teens. Meta described the intended outcome as something closer to what a teen would see in an age-appropriate movie, rather than allowing exposure by default.

On Messenger, Meta said the 13+ default setting limits teens’ ability to view links to Facebook content that Meta describes as inappropriate and reduces the ability to chat with accounts that primarily share inappropriate content on Facebook. Meta did not provide specific metrics on how many accounts or interactions would be affected, but the company described the approach as shifting what teens can access by default.

Meta also disclosed new and expanded detection techniques aimed at identifying underage accounts using artificial intelligence. The company said it is developing advanced AI that can detect accounts likely belonging to someone under 13 by analyzing more than just how a user enters their age, including visual analysis and contextual review of entire profiles.

According to Meta, the AI can examine contextual clues in profile content such as birthday celebrations or mentions of school grades, and it evaluates indicates across formats including posts, comments, bios and captions. Meta said it will also expand the visual analysis approach across additional parts of its apps, including Instagram Reels, Instagram Live and Facebook Groups. The company emphasized that the visual approach is not facial recognition, and that it estimates a general age range from themes and visual cues such as height or bone structure without identifying the specific person in the image.

In a separate feature for supervised teen accounts, Meta said Instagram will notify parents when a teen repeatedly tries to search for terms related to suicide or self-harm within a short period of time. Meta said the feature has been rolled out to supervising parents in the EU, Brazil and India, and that supervising parents and their teens will begin receiving notifications starting the day of the announcement.

Meta also said parents of teens enrolled in supervision can manage oversight across its apps using Family Center, which it describes as a one-stop shop to oversee teen activity across Instagram, Meta Horizon, Facebook and Messenger without jumping between separate apps and settings. The company added that it plans, in the coming months, to provide a more holistic view of teen activity, such as aggregated time spent, for parents enrolled in supervision.

While Meta’s announcement outlines how the controls work and what detection and notification features are being expanded, it does not provide public details on error rates, enforcement thresholds, or the scale of underage account detection that the new systems are expected to produce. The company also did not specify timelines for every region beyond the initial rollouts it named for the self-harm search alerts.