Julie Jargon, for The Wall Street Journal: (Apple News+ Link)

Starting this week, [Instagram] will begin automatically making youth accounts private, with the most restrictive settings. And younger teens won’t be able to get around it by changing settings or creating adult accounts with fake birth dates.

Account restrictions for teens include direct messaging only with people they follow or are already connected to, a reduction in adult-oriented content, automatic muting during nighttime hours and more.

Under the new accounts, teens won’t be able to see sensitive content, such as posts or videos that show people fighting or that promote cosmetic procedures—and Instagram’s algorithm won’t recommend sexually suggestive content or content about suicide and self-harm.

A Wall Street Journal investigation earlier this summer revealed that sexual videos were being recommended to teen accounts. Mosseri said Instagram has worked hard to ensure that the platform doesn’t show teens such content. The new teen default settings should significantly reduce the chances of that, he added.

Teen accounts will receive notifications telling them to close the app after an hour. (They can ignore it.) Sleep mode, which mutes notifications overnight, will be automatically enabled.

Good changes overall, and certainly better than nothing.

It seems pretty clear to me that kids shouldn’t be on social media at all and I’m shocked that so many parents allow it. What would be better is to prevent all kids and teens from using social media until they are mature enough to handle it, but that’s not going to come from Meta.