Instagram is restricting teen accounts—and blocking sneaky workarounds

Starting this week, it will begin automatically making youth accounts private, with the most restrictive settings. And younger teens won’t be able to get around it by changing settings or creating adult accounts with fake birth dates.

Account restrictions for teens include direct messaging only with people they follow or are already connected to, a reduction in adult-oriented content, automatic muting during nighttime hours and more.

Building on changes to teen accounts it announced earlier this year—and following years of criticism about child safety—the Meta Platforms-owned social network said it would shift 100 million teenagers in the U.S. and around the world into the guardrailed accounts. The move applies to all accounts with an under-18 birth date, though teens 16 and older will be able to change their settings without parental approval.

Any new teen accounts will be similarly restricted starting Tuesday. Parents will no longer have to manually enter those settings using Instagram’s parental supervision tool.

Teens are unlikely to be happy with the changes.

Instagram is expecting to lose “some meaningful amount of teen growth and teen engagement," Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in an interview. “I have to believe earning some trust from parents and giving parents peace of mind will help business in the long run, but it will certainly hurt in the short term."

Instagram plans to go even further, starting next year: Using artificial intelligence, it said, it will identify children who are lying about their age—then automatically place them into the restricted teen accounts.

Instagram and other social-media companies are under pressure from lawmakers and parents to protect their youngest users. Social media has contributed to bullying, eating disorders and anxiety and depression stemming from social comparisons, according to parents, doctors and researchers. The U.S. Surgeon General last year issued an advisory about the effects social media has on youth mental health.

Mosseri said the changes aren’t in response to legal or regulatory pressure, but are happening because Instagram has arrived at what it feels is the right approach to teen safety.

How teen accounts will work

Under the new accounts, teens won’t be able to see sensitive content, such as posts or videos that show people fighting or that promote cosmetic procedures—and Instagram’s algorithm won’t recommend sexually suggestive content or content about suicide and self-harm.

A Wall Street Journal investigation earlier this summer revealed that sexual videos were being recommended to teen accounts. Mosseri said Instagram has worked hard to ensure that the platform doesn’t show teens such content. The new teen default settings should significantly reduce the chances of that, he added.

Teen accounts will receive notifications telling them to close the app after an hour. (They can ignore it.) Sleep mode, which mutes notifications overnight, will be automatically enabled.

Teens 15 and under will need a parent’s permission—via the parental supervision tool—to change the more-restrictive settings. “If you want, you can override the default settings," Mosseri said of parents. “But if you don’t have time to do that, you don’t have to do anything."

If teens try to bypass the changes by creating new accounts with an older birth date, they will be prompted to either show an ID or to upload a video selfie for Instagram’s face-based age-prediction tool. The company already requires age verification when young people attempt to change the birth date on their accounts to say they are over 18.

Teens 16 and older will be able to change the restrictive settings themselves, unless their account is already under parental supervision. Instagram’s reasoning is that older teens are more mature and need more autonomy (which is one reason I have said teens should wait until 16 to be on social media).

The changes will roll out to teens in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia within the next two months and to teens in Europe later this year. The changes will apply to teens in the rest of the world starting in January.

Verifying age with AI

Early next year in the U.S., Meta plans to use its adult classifier AI model to determine which Instagram account holders really are teens. The company, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, has already used that model to prevent teens from accessing such adult features as Facebook Dating.

Verifying users’ ages has been considered one answer to safety-related problems on social media. Mosseri said he still believes Apple and Alphabet’s Google—which make the operating systems for most phones—should provide age verification at the device level.

Apple has said that social-media companies are best positioned to verify age and that sharing its users’ ages with third-party apps could go against privacy expectations.

Mosseri said AI models that predict age aren’t perfect. Meta’s AI is trained on an account’s interactions with other users and content, among other signals, to determine whether the birth date is false.

When the model begins policing, it will look for accounts held by people who are likely under 18. Those accounts will be placed under the teen restrictions, an Instagram spokeswoman said. But in the event the AI was wrong, the user will have an opportunity to appeal, and further train the AI.

Instagram and other social-media platforms prohibit children under 13 from using their services—but it is an open secret that many kids still sign up. Mosseri said he hopes the AI model will eventually be able to identify those underage users. If they can’t prove their eligibility, Instagram will disable their accounts, he said.

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Write to Julie Jargon at Julie.Jargon@wsj.com