Meta expands teen safety features across Instagram and Facebook with new parental controls

Meta has announced expanded safety features for teenage users on Instagram and Facebook, including default private accounts for users under 16, restrictions on who can message teens and what content appears in their feeds, and new parental supervision tools that allow parents to view their teen's privacy settings, see who their child has blocked or reported, and set time limits. The measures also include technology that detects accounts exhibiting potentially suspicious behaviour such as recently following large numbers of young accounts or being blocked or reported by a young user, and prevents those accounts from seeing or interacting with teen profiles in Explore, Reels or suggestions even if the teen's account is public.

Surfacing pattern-level risk in real time extends the protective perimeter beyond static account-level signals by monitoring the shape and escalation of an individual conversation as it unfolds. Guardii's anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection operates inside the direct message itself, flagging sustained targeting, age-inappropriate contact and coercive language before harm occurs, and alerting a parent, school or professional that a child is in a high-risk exchange without requiring that adult to read every message. Deployed across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, this conversation-level detection complements Meta's account-behaviour signals by intercepting hostile contact at the point it reaches the child, a capability particularly relevant where a threat actor has not yet accumulated the footprint of prior blocks or reports that retrospective behavioural analysis requires.