Meta expands safety features for teenagers

Meta on Tuesday unveiled new safety features to limit harmful content shown to teenagers on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, the first major policy change since the company was found responsible in March for harming a young woman while designing its platforms.

The features will limit how often teens see posts about topics like nutrition, weightlifting and anxiety in their feeds, Meta said, expanding on a broader teen safety effort it announced in October.

This kind of content “can be useful, but should be balanced with other types of content, rather than appearing repeatedly,” Meta said in a statement. “That’s why we’re testing ways to prevent teens from seeing too many posts of this kind at once.”

In October, Meta introduced a content rating system on Instagram modeled after film rating criteria; this system is now being extended to teenagers on Facebook and Messenger. Hundreds of millions of teenagers use Meta apps daily, which includes WhatsApp.

The changes are part of the company’s Teen Accounts program, created in 2024, which automatically made teen user accounts private and gave parents more control over their children’s accounts.

Meta has faced scrutiny over child safety issues for more than a decade, but is under increasing pressure from thousands of lawsuits filed by parents, prosecutors and school districts — two of which it recently lost.

In March, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and YouTube liable for harming a young woman by using features such as infinite scrolling and beauty filters. That same month, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for violating state consumer protection laws, including enabling sexual exploitation, in a lawsuit filed by the New Mexico attorney general.

Meta said on Tuesday it had worked with Alice, a trust and safety organisation, to measure how effective its policies were. The company said it also had parents rate millions of pieces of content to help fine-tune its moderation system.

In October, Meta also unveiled safety policies for AI chatbots amid growing concerns that the technology is harming young users. In January, Meta blocked teenagers from messaging Instagram’s AI characters, which are chatbots that take on different personalities.

Conversations between teenagers and the Meta AI chatbot now have the same content restrictions as the Meta movie rating system.