In Spetmber of 2024 Instagram changed the way the site worked for teenagers by introducing their new “teen accounts”. These new accounts, which function to the age of 18, were initially made available to users in the UK, US , Canada and Austrailia. Children aged 13 to 15 will only be able to adjust the settings by adding a parent or guardian to their account. See the original story here.
Research undertaken on the effectiveness of the changes towards the end of 2025 indictaed that up to 64% of safety tools are ineffective or missing.
- Mixed Effectiveness: Independent testing by child safety groups found that 30 out of 47 safety tools were "substantially ineffective or no longer exist".
- Content and Contact Risks: Researchers reported that accounts still accessed harmful content, including suicide/self-harm, and were exposed to sexualized comments from adults.
- Algorithmic Issues: Studies suggest algorithms still recommend inappropriate content or accounts, contradicting safety promises.
- Parental Control Usage: While parental supervision features exist, reports indicate they are underutilized, with some parents unaware of how to leverage them
In February 2026 Instagram announced parents using Instagram's child supervision tools would soon receive alerts if their teen repeatedly searches for suicide or self-harm related terms on the platform. Whilst this sounds a good step forward it is questionable whther it will prove effective and leaves a lot of potential dangers to still get through. Time will tell.
A more concerning issue for parents must be that if they have to impliment this for Instagram, they will then have to set up similar protections for each product as they become available which is a daunting prospect if you add gaming into the app soup of mobile device apps.
More worrying still, is the view expressed by the UK regulator OFCOM, that a major problem is the actual' willingness of parents to intervene to keep their children safe online. Sir Nick Clegg, speaking for META said: “One of the things we do find… is that even when we build these controls, parents don’t use them.”
Read the latest new story on this issue here.
Two options - Help parents to impliment these controls through evidence of their effectiveness and support. Alternatively put all of their trust in governments regulating the tech industried alone. Whilst the latter will have a significant impact it ignores the key dynamic of promoting the parent child relationship to ensure that childrens online activities are monitored effectively.
This whole argument is what inderpins the current project of The CyberTrust's Internet Family Monitoring Project which can be found here.
