Meta expands teen account protections and child safety features

Meta has announced a range of updates to bolster efforts to protect teens from potentially unsafe or unwanted contact and shared new data on the impact of its latest safety tools. 

"At Meta, we work to protect young people from both direct and indirect harm. Our efforts range from Teen Accounts, which are designed to give teens age-appropriate experiences and prevent unwanted contact, to our sophisticated technology that finds and removes exploitative content," Meta said in a statement.

"We’ve added new safety features to DMs in Teen Accounts to give teens more context about the accounts they’re messaging and help them spot potential scammers. Now, teens will see new options to view safety tips and block an account, as well as the month and year the account joined Instagram, all prominently displayed at the top of new chats.

We’ve also launched a new block and report option in DMs, so that people can take both actions together. While we’ve always encouraged people to both block and report, this new combined option will make this process easier, and help make sure potentially violating accounts are reported to us, so we can review and take action.

These new features complement the Safety Notices we show to remind people to be cautious in private messages and to block and report anything that makes them uncomfortable – and we’re encouraged to see teens responding to them. In June alone, they blocked accounts 1 million times and reported another 1 million after seeing a Safety Notice.

In June, teens and young adults also saw our new Location Notice on Instagram 1 million times, with 1 in 10 tapping on the notice to learn more about the steps they could take. Our Location Notice lets people know when they’re chatting with someone who may be in a different country, and is designed to help protect people from potential sextortion scammers who often misrepresent where they live. 

Since rolling out our nudity protection feature globally, 99% of people – including teens – have kept it turned on, and in June, over 40% of blurred images received in DMs stayed blurred, significantly reducing exposure to unwanted nudity. Nudity protection, on by default for teens, also encourages people to think twice before forwarding suspected nude images, and in May people decided against forwarding around 45% of the time after seeing this warning," it said.