A report from child safety advocacy groups, supported by researchers at Northeastern University in Boston, reveals that many of the safety features Meta claims to have implemented to protect young users on Instagram are ineffective or, in some instances, nonexistent.
The study, which Meta disputed as misleading, comes amid renewed pressure on tech companies to protect children and other vulnerable users of their social media platforms.
Of 47 safety features tested, the groups judged only eight to be completely effective.
Features meant to prevent young users from surfacing content related to self-harm by blocking search terms were easily circumvented, the researchers reported.
Anti-bullying message filters also failed to activate, even when prompted with the same harassing phrases Meta had used in a press release promoting them. A feature meant to redirect teens from bingeing on self-harm-related content never triggered, the researchers found.
Researchers did find that some of the teen account safety features worked as advertised, such as a “quiet mode”, which is meant to temporarily disable notifications at night, and a feature requiring parents to approve changes to a child’s account settings.
Titled “Teen Accounts, Broken Promises”, the report compiled and analysed Instagram’s publicly announced updates of youth safety and well-being features going back more than a decade.
Two of the groups behind the report – Molly Rose Foundation in the United Kingdom and Parents for Safe Online Spaces in the US – were founded by parents who allege their children died as a result of bullying and self-harm content on the social media company’s platforms.
The findings call into question Meta’s efforts “to protect teens from the worst parts of the platform,” says Laura Edelson, a professor at Northeastern University who oversaw a review of the findings. “Using realistic testing scenarios, we can see that many of Instagram’s safety tools simply are not working.”
Meta, which on Thursday said it was expanding its teen accounts to Facebook users internationally, called the findings erroneous and misleading.
“This report repeatedly misrepresents our efforts to empower parents and protect teens, misstating how our safety tools work and how millions of parents and teens are using them today,” said Meta spokesman Andy Stone.
He disputed some of the report’s appraisals, calling them “dangerously misleading”, and said the company’s approach to teen account features and parental controls has changed over time.
The advocacy groups and the university researchers received tips from Arturo Bejar, a former Meta safety executive, indicating that the Instagram features were flawed.
Bejar worked at Meta until 2015, then came back in late 2019 as a consultant for Instagram until 2021. He says that during his second stint at the company, Meta failed to respond to data indicating severe teen safety concerns on Instagram.
“I experienced first-hand how good safety ideas got whittled down to ineffective features by management,” Bejar says. “Seeing Meta’s claims about their safety tools made me realise it was critical to do a vigorous review.”
Meta documents show that as the company was promoting teen safety features on Instagram in 2024, it was aware that some had significant flaws.
For instance, safety employees warned in the last year that Meta had failed to maintain its automated detection systems for eating disorder and self-harm content.
As a result, Meta could not reliably avoid promoting content that glorifies eating disorders and suicide to teens as it had promised, or divert users who appeared to be consuming large amounts of such material, according to the documents.
Safety staff also acknowledged that a system to block search terms used by potential child predators was not being updated in a timely fashion, according to internal documents and people familiar with Meta’s product development.
While Meta has sought to limit adult strangers from contacting underage users on its app, adults can still communicate with minors “through many features that are inherent in Instagram’s design”, the report says.
In many cases, adult strangers were recommended to the minor account by Instagram’s features such as reels and “people to follow”.
“Most significantly, when a minor experiences unwanted sexual advances or inappropriate contact, Meta’s own product design inexplicably does not include any effective way for the teen to let the company know of the unwanted advance,” the report says.
Meta is making a fresh push to demonstrate its steps to protect children. On Thursday, it announced an expansion of its teen accounts to Facebook users outside the United States and said it would pursue new local partnerships with middle and high schools.
“We want parents to feel good about their teens using social media,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said.
