Meta announced on Thursday that it was launching “teen accounts” with additional protections for adolescent Facebook and Messenger users worldwide. This comes months after their initial rollout in major English-speaking countries.
“We’ve placed hundreds of millions of teens in Teen Accounts across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. Now we’re expanding them to teens around the world on Facebook and Messenger,” the US company stated in a blog post.
Meta’s teen accounts, which provide additional security settings, content restrictions, and parental controls for users aged 13 to 17, were first introduced on Instagram last year.
In April, the company reported that it had extended these features to Facebook and Messenger in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK.
The restrictions on Meta’s teen accounts are “designed to address parents’ top concerns with automatic protections to limit who their teens are talking to online and the content they’re seeing, and ensure their time is well spent,” the company explained.
These limits cannot be removed without parental consent for users under 16.
In recent years, there has been a growing concern about teens’ use of social networks, including fears that young people are spending too much time on screens with insufficient moderation on some platforms.
