Instagram said Thursday it will expand its safety tooling for teenagers by notifying parents when it detects that a teen “repeatedly” searches for terms clearly associated with suicide or self-harm. The company said the alerts will be delivered only to parents who are enrolled in Instagram’s parental supervision program, and it said the notifications are meant to help parents step in when a teen’s searches suggest the teen may need support.
Instagram said it already blocks that content from showing up in teen accounts’ search results and directs people to helplines instead. Under the new approach, Instagram said it would send the parent-facing alerts via email, text or WhatsApp, depending on the contact information Instagram has available, and it would also include a notification through the parent’s Instagram account.
The announcement arrived as Meta is facing legal scrutiny in the U.S. over claims that its platforms harm children. An ongoing trial in Los Angeles is examining whether Meta’s platforms deliberately addict and harm minors, and another case in New Mexico seeks to determine whether Meta failed to protect kids from sexual exploitation on its platforms, according to Instagram’s announcement. Thousands of families, along with school districts and government entities, have sued Meta and other social media companies alleging the companies deliberately design platforms to be addictive and fail to protect kids from content that can contribute to depression, eating disorders and suicide.
Meta has disputed that its platforms cause addiction, and during questioning by the plaintiff’s lawyer in the Los Angeles trial, Meta CEO Mark 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. The Instagram announcement did not indicate that the company was changing its position on the broader addiction claims, but it said the new safety notifications would operate within its existing supervision tools.
In the parental notification effort, Meta said its goal is to “empower parents to step in” when a teen’s searches suggest the teen may need support, while also avoiding alerts that could be sent too often. Meta said in a blog post that unnecessary notifications could become less useful overall.
Fairplay executive director Josh Golin criticized the approach, saying Instagram was making the change because the company is currently on trial in two different states. Golin said in a statement that Meta is “shifting the burden to parents rather than fixing the dangerous flaws” in how it designs its algorithms and platforms, and he argued that children should be protected regardless of whether their parents enroll in and use the supervision tools.
Instagram also said it is working on similar notifications tied to teens’ interactions with artificial intelligence. Meta said these would notify parents if a teen attempts to engage in certain types of conversations related to suicide or self-harm with Instagram’s AI, and it said it would share more in the coming months.