Meta launches teen safety features including notification limits and blocking unknown contacts

Meta has announced a suite of updated safety measures for teenage users on Instagram and Messenger, including automatic placement of under-16 accounts into restricted profiles that limit contact from unknown adults, night-time notification silencing, and expanded parental supervision tools that allow guardians to view who their child is messaging without accessing message content. The platform also confirmed it will begin testing video-selfie age verification in additional markets to prevent users from misrepresenting their date of birth.

Architectural guardrails such as restricted profiles and contact filtering reduce the surface area for unwanted contact, but they cannot evaluate the intent or escalation pattern within conversations that do occur, particularly when an offender has already established trust or is communicating through a peer account. Guardii's anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection operates inside the direct-message layer where those conversations unfold, analyzing behavioral signals such as repeated contact, gift promises, requests for images, threats and coercion in real time across Instagram and other messaging services, blocking or flagging hostile exchanges before they complete and surfacing a child in danger to a parent or professional without anyone needing to read the messages themselves.