In partnership with the Trust, Transparency & Control Labs (TTC Labs) and ThinkYoung, we’re opening applications for the EU Youth Design Jam, a pan-European co-design challenge inviting young people aged 16-18 to collaborate in our design process and provide feedback about their experiences online.

On April 27 in Brussels, participating teams from four EU Member States — Belgium, Spain, Czech Republic and Sweden — will come together with EU policymakers, Meta and other social media companies to share the joys and challenges they face in the digital world, along with their ideas for safe, positive and age-appropriate online experiences for their generation. 

Meta already drives industry-leading participation of teens, guardians and experts in the co-design of age-appropriate experiences globally through TTC Labs. We’ve built on TTC Labs’ multi-year effort to co-design with young people to improve safety and privacy across our technologies. We support the EU proposal for an EU Code of conduct on age-appropriate design and share the EU’s objectives to involve young people in shaping EU digital policies that affect their online lives. Launching the EU Youth Design Jam is one of many ways we’re working with young people to provide better technologies.

Helping Teens Focus and Set Boundaries

We want young people to build online relationships in a safe environment.  That’s why we work closely with experts in mental health, child psychology, digital literacy and more, to build features that help people connect online safely and responsibly. We’ve made strong progress in this space over the past year, including: 

• Defaulting teens into more private settings at sign up
• Helping protect teens against unwanted interactions from adults who don’t follow them
• Removing more content that violates our policies and making potentially sensitive content more difficult to find
• Offering tools for teens to spend more meaningful time online with features like ‘Take a Break’ and ‘Nudges,’ that encourage them to both take a break from Instagram and explore different topics on it.

We’ve also been using age verification technology to help teens have age-appropriate experiences, in partnership with Yoti, privacy-preserving age verification specialists.

Supporting Parents with the Family Center

Our Family Center  has educational resources from leading youth and safety, privacy and well-being experts on how to have conversations with your teens about healthy and safe online habits. 

We’ve also developed parental controls that help parents and teens navigate their time online together. They’re designed to strike the right balance between giving parents oversight, while preserving teens’ privacy and autonomy. These tools allow parents and guardians to:

• see who their teen follows and who follows them;
• see when their teen shares they’ve reported or blocked someone; 
• see when their teen changes any of the default privacy settings; and
• see how much time their teen is spending on Instagram, set daily limits and schedule breaks when they don’t want their teen to be using the app.

Our vision for Family Center is to eventually allow parents and guardians to help their teens manage experiences across Meta technologies, all from one central place. Read more on our Instagram Parents Guide.