Instagram unsafe for teens by design, report says

The majority of Instagram’s teen account restrictions and safety features are ineffective, according to a new report released Thursday. The app’s own design circumvents some controls and is unsafe for teens, the report said. The report came from the Cybersecurity for Democracy organization, as well as whistleblower Arturo Béjar and several nonprofit organizations founded by parents who became critical of social media after losing teenage children to suicide.

The report only addressed the app’s internal design rather than the content or how it was moderated. The report’s authors sent messages and comments between accounts they’d created to test 47 of Instagram’s 53 listed safety tools for teens. Two of the remaining tools would have required uploading harmful content to test, and the other four were deemed by the authors to deal more with privacy or content curation than safety.

What did they find?

• About 64% of the safety tools were no longer available, didn’t work, or were very easy to bypass. For example, Instagram owner Meta said that teen accounts receive warnings asking them to reconsider before posting a potentially hurtful comment. But that tool did not issue a warning when a tester used a vulgar term for women and urged suicide.

• Meta incentivizes features like disappearing messages that make inappropriate behavior harder to track.

• Instagram's algorithm recommended graphic sexual descriptions, self-harm content, and violent videos to teen accounts.

• Other safety tools, such as blocking another user, work as described. But the report said teens should be able to report a reason for blocking an account—for example, due to sexual harassment—so Meta receives warnings about dangerous users.

How did Meta respond? The report misstated how safety tools work and didn’t reflect the reality of how millions of parents and teens use the accounts, the company told the Associated Press.

Meta also wrote in a Thursday blog post that it had put hundreds of millions of teens in the more restrictive teen accounts across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, and that it was adding support for schools and teachers. 

Dig deeper: Read Carolina Lumetta’s report on President Donald Trump’s new TikTok app deal with China.