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Instagram will soon notify parents if their teens repeatedly search for self-harm or suicide-related content. The alerts will go to parents who use the app's supervision tools, and both teens and parents will receive a notification about the update ahead of the rollout.
Phrases that could trigger the alert include “suicide”, “self-harm,” or others that indicate the teen wants to hurt themselves. If the search activity is repeated within a short period, Instagram will notify parents via email, text, WhatsApp, and an in-app notification.
The in-app notification for parents opens to a full-screen message explaining what their teen searched for, along with resources to help them deal with the sensitive matter. Instagram says it doesn’t want to alert a parent every time their child searches for self-harm content because doing it too many times “could make the notifications less useful overall.”
(Credit: Meta)The update arrives as Meta faces several lawsuits for harming teens. CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before a jury in a landmark app addiction trial just last week.
Instagram, meanwhile, automatically places all users under 16 into restricted Teen Accounts now. The company says it already has strict policies against content that glorifies self-harm, and the upcoming alerts are meant to be an additional layer of protection. They will be limited to parents in the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada at launch next week and will roll out to parents in other regions later this year.
Meta is also preparing to notify parents if teens have conversations about suicide with Meta AI. That comes after multiple families sued OpenAI, accusing its chatbot of encouraging suicide.