Meta has announced a range of Instagram safety features for young teens to ensure they can enjoy an age appropriate experience on the platform.
These features have been introduced for the previously introduced teen accounts and will provide more information about who they are chatting with.
Now teens will have easier and more prominent access to safety tips and the ability to block an account from the top of DM chats.
What will also be displayed is the date the person joined Instagram to give teens more of an idea of who they a chatting with and help them spot potential scammers.
There is now also a combined block and report option so they can do both at once.
In June, teens blocked accounts more than a million times and reported another million after seeing a safety notice on Instagram.
Stats show 99 per cent of teen accounts have kept their nudity protection feature turned on.
In June, there were more than 40 per cent of blurred images received in DMs that stayed blurred meaning unwanted exposure to nudity was reduced by 40 per cent.
Teens and young adults will also be introduced to the new location notice in June which they saw more than a million times with one in 10 tapping on the notice to learn more.
The location notice makes it clear when they are chatting to someone who may be from a different country and was designed in a way to protect people from potential sextortion scammers who often lie about where they live.
A lot of these new teen account protections are also being brought into adult managed accounts.
Instagram does allow adults to run accounts for children under 13 but only if it’s clear in the bio that the adult is managing the account.
If Instagram sees the account is being run by the child themselves it will be removed.
These accounts will now have protection from unwanted messages and filters to remove offensive comments.
Instagram has removed around 135,000 violating Instagram accounts that were sexualizing these accounts along with 500,000 Instagram and Facebook accounts that were linked to the original accounts.
