Meta Rolls Out Enhanced 'Teen Accounts' Globally for Facebook and Messenger Users

Meta Activates Facebook 'Teen Accounts' Worldwide

The limits cannot be removed without parental consent for users under 16.

France:

Meta announced Thursday the global activation of "teen accounts" with enhanced protections for adolescent Facebook and Messenger users, following their earlier implementation in major English-speaking countries.

"We've placed hundreds of millions of teens in Teen Accounts across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, and now we're expanding them to teens around the world on Facebook and Messenger," the American technology company stated in their blog post.

These specialized teen accounts, offering additional security settings, content restrictions and parental controls for users aged 13 to 17, were initially introduced on Instagram last year.

Meta revealed in April that they had extended these protections to Facebook and the platform's Messenger private chat service in the United States, Canada, Australia and Great Britain.

The restrictions on Meta's teen accounts are "designed to address parents' top concerns with automatic protections to limit who their teens are talking to online and the content they're seeing, and ensure their time is well spent," according to the company.

For users under 16, these limitations cannot be removed without explicit parental consent.

In recent years, there has been growing concern regarding teenagers' social media usage, including fears that young people spend excessive time on screens with insufficient moderation on certain platforms.