Meta unveiled new safety features on Tuesday to limit harmful content shown to teenagers 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.
The features will limit how frequently teenagers are shown posts about topics like nutrition, weight lifting and anxiety in their feeds, Meta said, expanding on a broader teen safety effort it announced in October.
That kind of content “can be helpful, but it should be balanced with other types of content rather than shown repeatedly,” Meta said in a statement. “That’s why we’re testing ways to limit teens from seeing too many posts of this kind in one go.”
In October, Meta introduced a rating system for content on Instagram modeled after movie rating criteria; that system is now expanding to teenagers on Facebook and Messenger. Hundreds of millions of teenagers use Meta’s apps, which also include WhatsApp, each day.
The changes are part of the company’s Teen Accounts program, created in 2024, which automatically made the accounts of teenage users private and gave parents more control over their children’s accounts.
Meta has faced scrutiny around child safety issues for over 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 scroll and beauty filters. That same month, a jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million for violating state consumer protection laws, including enabling sexual exploitation, in a lawsuit brought by New Mexico’s attorney general.
Meta said on Tuesday that it had worked with Alice, a trust and safety organization, to measure how effective its policies are. The company said it had also had parents rate millions of pieces of content to help fine-tune its moderation system.
In October, Meta had also unveiled safety policies around artificial intelligence chatbots amid growing concerns that the technology was harming young users. In January, Meta blocked teenagers from messaging Instagram’s A.I. characters, which are chatbots that take on different personalities.
Conversations between teenagers and the Meta A.I. chatbot now have the same kinds of content restrictions as Meta’s movie ratings system.
Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco.
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