Starting today, Instagram will categorize new and existing users under the age of 18 into “Teen Accounts” – a move that will impact how millions of teens interact with the platform. The new account type will automatically apply a number of protections to young users, and only users 16 and older will be able to relax some of these settings.

First of all, all minors’ accounts on Instagram will be private by default (not just those of teens under 16), and some of Instagram’s existing restrictions on young users will apply, such as those preventing strangers from sending them direct messages. But there are other new features coming too, including a sleep mode that mutes notifications from 10pm to 7am.

“This will standardize, simplify, and make much of our work accessible to all teens,” said Antigone Davis, Meta’s global security chief, in an interview with The edge“It essentially provides a set of protections that are already in place and implemented.”

Teens can also choose age-appropriate topics to see more of in Instagram recommendations and on the Explore page, like Sports, Animals & Pets, Travel, and more. Instagram will continue to limit the types of content teens see on Reels or the Explore page, and will send notifications to remind teens to take breaks from the app.

Along with these changes, Instagram is also updating some of its parental controls. Parents who want to supervise their child on the app will be able to see who their child has messaged in the past seven days (without seeing the content of the messages). They will also be able to see what topics their child has viewed most.

While Instagram allows teens over 16 to change these settings, younger teens will need a parent’s permission to make changes, such as making their account public. Parents will then need to set up Instagram’s supervision tools to approve the change.

Instagram’s Teen Accounts will gradually roll out to users in the US, UK, Australia and Canada. Teens signing up for new accounts will notice the change first, with existing users following within about a week. Meta plans to launch Teen Accounts in the European Union later this year and will expand the feature to its other platforms in 2025.

But even if these protections now apply to all teens on Instagram, the question remains how well Meta can implement them. “We know that some teens will try to lie about their age to get around these protections,” Davis says. “So we’re going to create new ways to verify a teen’s age.” Users trying to change their age from under 18 to over 18 already have to take a video selfie, upload their ID, or have other users confirm their age, but Instagram’s new systems go a step further.

The platform can now use AI to look for signals that might indicate a user is under 18. For example, if a user says they’re 18 when creating an account, but someone tells them “Happy 14th birthday” in the app, Instagram can use that to determine their true age. “One of the challenges with age verification in general is that it can be very difficult to determine,” says Davis. “We have to take a layered approach because there’s no foolproof way to do this.”

Since Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a trove of internal documents in 2021 detailing the company’s studies on teen mental health, lawmakers have taken a tougher stance on social platforms and their impact on children. Instagram has rolled out a number of child safety features in recent years and, in response, introduced parental controls in 2022. The platform has even agreed to help researchers study its impact on the mental health of teens and young adults.

All this still does not appease lawmakers. Nearly 40 US states support the Secretary of Health’s proposal to put warning labels on social media platforms, and the Senate passed a groundbreaking children’s online safety bill in July.