Meta expands safety features for teens

Meta on Tuesday unveiled new safety features to limit harmful content presented to teens on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, its first major policy change since the company was found liable in March for harming a young woman with the design of its platforms.

These 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 announced in October.

This type of content “can be useful, but it should be balanced with other types of content rather than being displayed repeatedly,” Meta said in a statement. “That’s why we’re testing ways to prevent teens from seeing too many messages like this at one time.”

In October, Meta introduced a content rating system on Instagram, modeled on movie rating criteria; this system now extends to adolescents on Facebook and Messenger. Hundreds of millions of teenagers use Meta's apps, which also include WhatsApp, every day.

The changes are part of the company's Teen Accounts program, established in 2024, which automatically makes teen users' accounts private and gives 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, state attorneys general and school districts — two of which it recently lost.

In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for harming a young woman with features like infinite scrolling and beauty filters. The same month, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for violations of the state's consumer protection laws, including permitting sexual exploitation, in a lawsuit filed by the New Mexico attorney general.

Meta said Tuesday it worked with Alice, a trust and safety organization, to measure the effectiveness of its policies. The company said it also asked parents to rate millions of pieces of content to help it refine its moderation system.

In October, Meta also unveiled security policies regarding artificial intelligence chatbots, amid growing concerns that the technology would harm younger users. In January, Meta blocked teens from sending messages to Instagram's AI. characters, which are chatbots that adopt different personalities.

Teen Conversations and Meta A.I. Chatbots now have the same types of content restrictions as Meta's movie rating system.