Social media apps such as Instagram and Tikitok are applying restrictions to their apps for teens. 

Instagram is starting to take actions to address the issue of young teens being exposed to harmful and inappropriate media. Studies say that teens are being introduced to videos, pictures, music, and more, which is harmful to their innocence. According to Meta, they are putting a PG-13 filter on all content on teenagers accounts. This is to give peace of mind to parents and guardians that their children are not being exposed to mature content that is inappropriate for their age group. 

Advocacy groups as well as legislators, have recently put a lot of  pressure on social media apps to do a better job on monitoring the media they are putting out for younger children to have access to. According to researchers, there has been a rise in poor mental health in young adolescents, and harmful content exposure has had a direct influence on that. 

The changes these restrictions will have to the app include, only allowing content that would be approved for a PG-13. Anyone under 18 will automatically have these restrictions applied to their accounts. Parental permission will be necessary in order to remove these restrictions. If parents allow restrictions to be removed, the content on that account will have no filters, and all sorts of media will be allowed. A new age detecting device has been implemented into Instagram to assure that teens are not faking their age in an attempt to remove restrictions without parietal consent. Accounts known to post inappropriate content, AI images or videos, and harmful music or audios will be automatically blocked with the new filter on teens restricted accounts. 

According to Meta, other countries around the world are expected to also be impacted by these restrictions by 2026, and the regulations are also expected to become even more strict over time. Meta also claims they will attempt to transfer these types of restriction to their other apps such as Facebook.