The Download
- Instagram’s Teen Accounts and Supervision offer many controls to limit sensitive content, app use, and more.
- Snapchat’s parental controls are fewer, but Teen Accounts automatically restrict content access and location sharing.
- Neither platform verifies age and parents can’t monitor all activity or interactions.
If you’re a parent to a teen, you’re all too familiar with the growing concerns about social media safety for teens. Instagram and Snapchat are similar in many ways, but privacy, communication, and data settings differ in numerous ways.
This article explores the settings parents can manage to keep kids safer, and the advantages and limitations of each platform.
Snapchat Parental Controls
Snapchat states that teens must be 13 to create an account. Every user under 18 is enrolled as a Teen Account, which means extra safeguards are on by default. These include:
- Private account status
- In-app warnings for messaging non-contacts
- Only age-appropriate content
- No location sharing
Snapchat has some parental controls, which live in the Family Center. Parents can access these settings by creating their own Snapchat accounts and sending an invite to their teens.
When a teen accepts the request, parents can open the Family Center by tapping Settings > Family Center and control the following:
- Communications/contacts: From Recent Conversations, parents can view who their kids have chatted with in the last week, including in Group Chats and deleted or blocked chats.
- Content: From Family Center, parents can turn on the Restrict Sensitive Content setting, which restricts sensitive content your child might see from Stories and Spotlights. However, this tool doesn’t filter mature images or conversations in chats or search.
- Location: Parents can get location details by requesting Live Location from their teens. Once parents receive an accepted request, they can also confirm when their kids reach a particular destination by tapping Place Alerts > Add a Place.
- AI access: Parents can turn off AI responses for teens by tapping Recent Conversations > My AI.
Instagram Parental Controls
Instagram’s approach to safeguarding teens is broader and includes supervised Teen Accounts via the Meta Family Center.
Like Snapchat, Instagram sets up private Teen Accounts for users under 18, which automatically:
- Restricts users over 19 who are not approved followers from contacting them
- Blurs nudity and potentially offensive content in messages
- Limits sensitive content in Explore, Reels, and feed
- Turns on sleep mode from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.
- Turns off live broadcasting
- Sets a one-hour daily time limit
- Prevents kids under 16 from changing any settings without parental permission
Supervision in the Meta Family Center offers more layers of insight into what teens are doing with their accounts.
In addition to editing sleep mode and daily time limit settings, Instagram Supervision includes access to:
- Accounts following and followed
- Blocked accounts
- Account privacy and sensitive content settings
- Message request restrictions
- A preview of what teens and parents see, respectively
Parents and teens can send supervision invitations, and the child must confirm that a parent is the correct supervisor.
Parents can monitor multiple Teen Accounts from one adult account, but if a child has multiple Instagram profiles, she’s required to set up supervision for each account.
Final Verdict: Instagram vs. Snapchat for Teens
Unfortunately there’s not really a clear winner in this race, as both have major blind spots.
On numbers alone, Instagram’s parental control list is longer but also a bit more convoluted to set up than Snapchat’s offering.
Here’s how they stack up in some important areas:
- Supervision/monitoring permission: Both platforms require teens to accept a request to oversee their accounts. If kids deny the request, parental monitoring via the built-in tools isn’t possible. And either party can cancel the arrangement.
- Lack of age verification: By default, Snapchat users between 13-17 and Instagram account holders under 16 are enrolled as Teen Accounts. But these protections assume that a child who creates an account isn’t falsifying her birthday to bypass the automatic restrictions and parental monitoring.
- Location sharing risks: Snapchat turns off location sharing for all users, but if families turn on location sharing in the Family Center, there’s a risk of inadvertent location sharing with strangers. Similarly, locations sharing is off for teens on Instagram, but live location is allowed via direct messages for an hour.
- Limited access to the content teens see: While Teen Accounts, parental controls, and Supervision help parents limit mature content, full message access isn’t possible. The disappearing nature of messaging on Snapchat also presents cause for worry because parents may have a harder time gaining insight into how a child has been using her account.
- Data sharing and privacy: Both platforms share account data with third parties and allow users to opt out of ads and location sharing. But Instagram’s data mining practices and user control options are murkier. Users can take more ownership, but parent company Meta makes finding data privacy settings trickier to find under layers of menus.
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