Starting today, Instagram will begin putting new and existing users under the age of 18 into “Teen Accounts” — a move that will affect how tens of millions of teens interact with the platform. The new account type automatically applies a set of protections to young users, and only users 16 years of age and older can loosen some of these settings.

For starters, the accounts of all minors on Instagram will be private by default (not just teens under 16) and will come with some of Instagram’s existing restrictions for young users, such as those that prevent strangers from direct messaging them. But other new features are coming, too, including a Sleep Mode that silences notifications from 10PM to 7AM.

“This really standardizes a lot of the work that we’ve done, simplifies it, and brings it to all teens,” Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, said during an interview with The Verge. “It provides essentially a set of protections that are in place and are already populated.”

Teens will also get to pick age-appropriate topics they can see more of in Instagram’s recommendations and on the Explore page, such as “sports,” “animal & pets,” “travel,” and more. Instagram will continue limiting the types of content teens see on Reels or on the Explore page. It will also send alerts reminding teens to take breaks from the app.

Along with these changes, Instagram is updating some of its parental controls. Parents who want to supervise their teen on the app will be able to see who their child has messaged in the past seven days (without seeing the contents of the messages). They’ll also get to see which topics their teen has chosen to view most often.

While Instagram will let teens over the age of 16 tweak these settings, younger teens will need the permission of a parent to make any changes, like making their account public. Parents will then have to set up Instagram’s supervisory tools to approve the change.

Instagram’s teen accounts are rolling out gradually to users in the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada. Teens who sign up for new accounts will see the change first, followed by existing users within about a week. Meta plans on bringing Teen Accounts to the European Union later this year and will expand the feature across its other platforms in 2025.

But even with these protections coming to all teens on Instagram, questions remain about how well Meta can apply them. “We know some teens are going to try to lie about their age to get around these protections,” Davis says. “Which is why we are going to be building up new opportunities to verify a teen’s age.” Users who attempt to change their age from under 18 to over 18 are already required to record a video selfie, upload their ID, or have other users vouch for their age, but Instagram’s new systems take things a step further.

The platform can now use AI to scan for signals that may indicate a user is under 18. For example, if a user says they’re 18 when creating an account but someone on the app tells them “Happy 14th birthday,” Instagram can use that to inform their real age. “One of the challenges for age broadly is it can be very hard to know,” Davis says. “We have to take a multi-layered approach because there’s no one foolproof way to do this.”

Since Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a trove of internal documents detailing the company’s studies on the mental health of teens in 2021, lawmakers have taken a harder stance on social platforms and their effect on kids. Instagram has rolled out a slew of child safety features over the past few years and launched parental controls in 2022 in response. The platform has even agreed to help researchers study its impact on the mental health of teens and young adults.

All of this still hasn’t put lawmakers at ease. Nearly 40 US states are backing the surgeon general’s proposal to put warning labels on social media platforms, while the Senate passed landmark online child safety legislation in July.

After a disclaimer that nothing we’d hear tonight is financial or legal advice, followed by a 40-minute interview with former President Donald Trump — which touched on the apparent attempt on his life at a Florida golf course, the border, the “evil forces” conspiring against him, and his granddaughter’s foreign language skills — and subsequent conversations with Trump’s sons and associates, the X Space dedicated to announcing Trump’s “crypto platform” more or less got to the point.

The goal of World Liberty Financial, Trump’s new decentralized finance project, is to drive “the mass adoption of stablecoins and decentralized finance,” according to a statement posted on its X account earlier this month. But over the course of the lengthy “announcement” on Monday night, neither Trump nor any of his business partners explained how exactly that would work.

Finally, more than two hours into the stream, Corey Caplan — the co-founder of the decentralized lending platform Dolomite, who is working as an adviser for Trump’s project — said World Liberty Financial would “sell and otherwise distribute governance tokens called WLFI.” The token sales will be limited to “certain persons who would be eligible to participate in transactions that are exempt from registration under US federal securities law,” meaning only accredited investors under Regulation D and Regulation S can buy the token. Three people with knowledge of the project told the New York Times that World Liberty Financial has been pitched as a borrowing and lending platform.

Earlier in the stream, a bevy of Trump relatives and associates described World Liberty Financial as a way of helping the “huge, approachable class of people who have either been debanked … or they just don’t have a bank that they can go to, and they don’t have a bank that will listen to them.”

The details started to emerge a little over an hour and a half into the announcement, when two of Trump’s other business partners — Chase Herro and Zak Folkman — revealed some details of the “crypto platform” Trump and his sons have been teasing for over a month. World Liberty Financial will “onboard as many people through simple products where they can actually start to earn yield on their assets,” said Folkman, the co-founder of Dough Finance, a crypto platform that was hacked earlier this year.

Trump first announced the project in August. “For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites. It’s time we take a stand—together. #BeDefiant,” he posted on Truth Social. Aside from a link to a Telegram channel, the post included no other details about the platform or what it entailed. The uncertainty around the announcement has let opportunists — and hackers — take advantage of Trump’s fans. Earlier this month, hackers breached the X accounts of Tiffany Trump and Lara Trump, on which they posted links to a fake World Liberty Financial website announcing that the venture had launched.

Donald Trump Jr. and real estate developer and landlord Steve Witkoff, both of whom are also involved in World Liberty Financial, framed the project as a way of helping underserved and unbanked communities.

“If you want to borrow money today, you have to be almost anointed. You have to be a member of the privileged class,” said Witkoff, who in 2017 purchased the Fontainebleau Resort Las Vegas for $600 million.

Don Jr., who described himself as “still a neophyte” in the crypto space, said decentralized finance can help people who have been excluded from traditional financial markets. The announcement played up a popular fear among the crypto crowd: being debanked, potentially as punishment for political dissent.

“There was a time period where the Trumps, we could’ve picked up the phone and called and CEO of any bank,” Don Jr. said. “We went from being people who would have been the elite in that world to just being, like, totally canceled.” It’s possible that cancellation has more to do with Trump’s history of lying about his wealth or running a scammy for-profit college than it does with his political views.

Despite claims that World Liberty Financial will put “the power of finance back in the hands of the people,” initial reports suggested that its founding token would mostly be distributed to people involved in the project. A white paper obtained by CoinDesk said 70 percent of WLFI would be held by the founding members, team, and service providers.

During the stream, however, Caplan chastised the “fake news media” reports of how the token would be distributed and said approximately 63 percent of the tokens will be sold to the public, while 20 percent would be “reserved for team compensation.”

World Liberty Financial appears to be part of a broader Trump outreach campaign to the crypto community. Trump headlined this year’s Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, where he said he’d never sell the US’s Bitcoin holdings but stopped short of promising to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. He’s also released four NFT collections, which netted him at least $7.2 million, according to August financial disclosure forms.

It’s evident that Trump, who disappeared from the stream after the first 40 minutes, is the face of a product he knows almost nothing about. He had little to say about cryptocurrency aside from some vague comments about the “very hostile environment” the Securities and Exchange Commission has created for the crypto community — and an admission that politicians know that embracing crypto could help them win voters.

“You’re going to be happy, and you’re going to love your crypto, and as long as you have crypto, you’re happy,” Trump said early in the stream. “I think crypto is one of those things we have to do whether we like it or not.”