The Biggest Change to Instagram in Years

Teenagers are said to live on their phones, and one of the places where they spend the most time is Instagram. For many years, the perception has been that they are totally unsupervised there, much to their detriment. That may be changing: Meta, which owns Instagram, announced today that teenagers who use the app will be subject to a slew of new restrictions, as well as increased parental oversight. Under the new policy, accounts made or owned by anyone under the age of 18 will have limited functionality by default—a bid, the company says, to give parents “peace of mind that their teens are safe with the right protections in place.”

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“On the face of it, it’s what a lot of people have advocated for a long time,” Candice L. Odgers, the associate dean for research and a professor of psychological science and informatics at UC Irvine, told me.

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Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business and one of the most well-known and influential voices on the topic of teenage social-media use, has argued that these apps are out-and-out “dangerous” for young people. 

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