This was reported by Tech Crunch, Ukrinform reported.

Until now, Instagram had banned adults over the age of 18 from sending messages to teenagers who were not their followers. The new default restrictions will apply to all users under the age of 16, and in some countries up to the age of 18. Meta said it will send special notifications to users.

On Messenger, minors will only be able to receive messages from their Facebook friends or contacts.

Meta will also make the parental controls on its platforms more robust: parents and guardians will be able to allow or deny changes made to privacy settings by teens. In the past, when teens changed these settings, parents would receive a notification, but they couldn’t do anything about it.

For example, if a teen tries to change their account from private to public or changes the controls on who can send them private messages, parents can block those actions.

Meta first introduced parental control tools for Instagram in 2022.

The company also said it plans to launch a feature that will prevent teens from seeing unwanted and inappropriate images in their private messages. The feature will also work on end-to-end encrypted chats and will ‘block’ young people from sending such images.

As reported by Ukrinform, Meta Platforms announced that it will start hiding more content from teenagers on Instagram and Facebook.