Instagram is committed to providing young people with safer and more private experiences. We have dedicated teams focused on youth safety, and we work closely with experts to inform the features we develop. Here are some of the default settings and additional tools for teens on Instagram. Age requirements may vary by country.

We require people to be at least 13 years old to sign up for Instagram. People can confirm their age by providing their birthday, photo identification, and/or submitting a video selfie. Confirming your age is a requirement for everyone on Instagram. You can learn more about age verification in Newsroom.

Teens under 16 years old (or under 18 in certain countries) have their account set to private as a default when they join Instagram. Private accounts let people control who sees or responds to their content. Learn more about private Instagram accounts.

As of May 2022, when teens under 18 sign up for Instagram, accounts they don’t follow cannot tag, mention or use their content in Reels Remixes or Guides by default.

To protect teens from unwanted contact, we restrict people over 19 years old from sending private messages to teens who don’t follow them. If an adult tries to message a teen who doesn’t follow that adult, the adult will receive a notification that DM’ing the teen isn’t an option. Learn more about direct messaging for teens.

We’ve developed technology that allows us to find adult accounts that have shown potentially suspicious behavior, such as adults who have recently been blocked or reported by a young person. We stop these adult accounts from interacting with teen accounts the following ways:

The Sensitive Content Control enables people to choose how much or how little sensitive content they see from accounts they don’t follow. There are two options for teens: “Standard” and “Less.” All teens on Instagram under 16 years old are defaulted into the “Less” state, unless they explicitly opt-out.

This makes it more difficult for young people to come across potentially sensitive content or accounts in Search, Explore, Hashtag Pages, Reels, Feed Recommendations and Suggested Accounts. Learn more about the Sensitive Content Control.

For all users on Instagram, we remove content that goes against our Community Guidelines and we do not recommend content that goes against our Recommendation Guidelines.

For teens under 16, we hide certain sensitive content on Instagram even if it’s been shared by friends or people they follow. For example, content that discusses self-harm and eating disorders, or that includes borderline adult nudity. We're working on applying these policies for people under 18 within the coming months.

For teens under 18, content that is reviewed and may be disturbing (for example, some instances of graphic and violent content) is removed.

Lastly, for teens under 18, we restrict the visibility of certain restricted goods and services including content related to alcohol, tobacco, bladed weapons, weight loss products, cosmetic procedures, sex toys, sexual enhancement products, gambling or entheogens.

Supervision is a set of tools and insights that parents and guardians can use to help support their teens ages 13-17 on Instagram. Supervision is optional, and both the parent and the teen must agree to participate. When supervision is set up in Family Center, a parent can set time limits, schedule breaks, see their teen’s time spent on Instagram, see their teens followers and who they follow, shared connections, who they’ve blocked or reported, and see the teen’s privacy setting selections.

For teens 13-17 scrolling for a period of time, we’ll show a notification suggesting they turn on break reminders if they aren’t already using them. This encourages the teen to take a break from Instagram and suggests they set reminders to take more breaks in the future. Learn more about break reminders.

For teens 13-17, if they use Instagram for a period of time late at night, we also send them reminders to turn on Quiet Mode. Once enabled, Quiet Mode silences all notifications, changes profile activity status to ‘In quiet mode’ and automatically sends auto-replies to direct messages. Quiet mode can help teens focus, and encourage them to set boundaries with friends and followers. Learn more about Quiet Mode.

Teens under 18 in certain countries will see a notification that encourages them to switch to a different topic if they’ve been looking at the same type of content on Explore for a while. This nudge is designed to encourage teens to discover something new. Learn more about this type of nudge.