Instagram said Thursday it will notify parents if their teens “repeatedly” search for terms that Instagram associates with suicide or self-harm, expanding its approach to teen safety beyond search-result blocking. The company said the alerts will be sent to parents who participate in Instagram’s parental supervision program, rather than to all parents or guardians.
The parent notifications will be triggered when a teen’s searches meet Instagram’s “repeatedly” threshold for queries clearly associated with suicide or self-harm, the company said. Instagram said it will send the alerts through the contact method available for the parent in the supervision program, including email, text or WhatsApp, and also through a notification in the parent’s Instagram account.
Instagram said it is already blocking such content from showing up in teen accounts’ search results and directing people to helplines. In its explanation of the new tool, Meta said the notifications are meant to help parents step in when a teen’s searches may indicate the teen needs support, while trying to prevent the alerts from becoming too frequent to remain useful.
“Our goal is to empower parents to step in if their teen’s searches suggest they may need support. We also want to avoid sending these notifications unnecessarily, which, if done too much, could make the notifications less useful overall,” Meta said in a blog post.
The announcement arrives amid court fights over whether Meta’s platforms harm children. A trial underway in Los Angeles is examining whether Meta’s platforms deliberately addict and harm minors, while a separate case in New Mexico seeks to determine whether Meta failed to protect kids from sexual exploitation on its platforms, according to the reporting. Thousands of families and others, including school districts and government entities, have sued Meta and other social media companies, alleging they designed their platforms to be addictive and failed to protect children from content that can contribute to depression, eating disorders and suicide.
Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have disputed that the platforms cause addiction. During questioning in the Los Angeles trial, Zuckerberg said he still agreed with a prior statement that the existing body of scientific work has not proved that social media causes mental health harms.
Fairplay’s executive director Josh Golin criticized Instagram’s move, saying the company was responding to its legal exposure rather than fixing the underlying design. “Instagram is clearly making this move now because the company is currently on trial in two different states for addicting and harming kids,” Golin said. He added that the notifications shift the burden to parents and argued that children should be protected regardless of whether a parent uses the supervision tools, saying, “If a product is not safe for teens to use without parental intervention, it shouldn’t be marketed to teens at all.”
Meta said it is also developing similar notifications tied to how teens interact with artificial intelligence. The company said the new AI-related notifications would alert parents if a teen attempts to engage in certain types of conversations related to suicide or self-harm, and said it expects to share more in the coming months.