With the announcement made by Instagram, all new and existing Instagram users under the age of 18 will now have restricted DMs and features such as Sleep Mode.

Instagram announced its new work for underage users on the official website of its owner Meta. In the announcement, Meta officials stated that ‘teen accounts’ will start to be used in Azerbaijan as of January, along with other countries.

New measures to be taken with youth accounts have become clear

• The accounts of young account users will be automatically hidden and only the content shared by the followers accepted by the users will be visible.
• With the new restrictions, the content that underage users may encounter in the Explore and Reels areas will be filtered. Thus, users in this age group will be protected from content such as violence and cosmetic product advertisements, which are called sensitive content.
• Users under the age of 18 who have this account will now only be able to interact and message with the people they follow.
• Another innovation is the time warning. Thus, young account users who exceed 60 minutes per day will be sent notifications telling them to exit the application.
• A new feature that attracts attention will be the sleep mode restriction. With this feature, incoming notifications will be muted and messages will be automatically responded. Sleep mode will be active between 10 pm and 7 am.

With the new features announced by Instagram, parents will now be able to take full control. Within the scope of the young account, parents of users will be able to control their children's accounts and manage their settings. Parents who wish will be able to allow them to manage the settings themselves.

With the new restriction, parents will be able to see which content topics their children have chosen and browse which users they have messaged with in the last week. However, the content of the messages will not be accessible. In addition, parents will have the right to determine the time their children use the application and prevent them from entering Instagram at certain time intervals.