Instagram is introducing separate teen accounts for those under 18 as it tries to make the platform safer for children amid a growing backlash against how social media affects young people’s lives.

Beginning Tuesday in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, anyone under under 18 who signs up for Instagram will be placed into a teen account and those with existing accounts will be migrated over the next 60 days. Teens in the European Union will see their accounts adjusted later this year.

Meta acknowledges that teenagers may lie about their age and says it will require them to verify their ages in more instances, like if they try to create a new account with an adult birthday. The Menlo Park, California company also said it is building technology that proactively finds teen accounts that pretend to be grownups and automatically places them into the restricted teen accounts.

The teen accounts will be private by default. Private messages are restricted so teens can only receive them from people they follow or are already connected to. “Sensitive content,” such as videos of people fighting or those promoting cosmetic procedures, will be limited, Meta said. Teens will also get notifications if they are on Instagram for more than 60 minutes and a “sleep mode” will be enabled that turns off notifications and sends auto-replies to direct messages from 10 p.m. until 7 a.m.

While these settings will be turned on for all teens, 16 and 17-year-olds will be able to turn them off. Kids under 16 will need their parents’ permission to do so.

“The three concerns we’re hearing from parents are that their teens are seeing content that they don’t want to see or that they’re getting contacted by people they don’t want to be contacted by or that they’re spending too much on the app,” said Naomi Gleit, head of product at Meta. “So teen accounts is really focused on addressing those three concerns.”

The announcement comes as the company faces lawsuits from dozens of U.S. states that accuse it of harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.

In the past, Meta’s efforts at addressing teen safety and mental health on its platforms have been met with criticism that the changes don’t go far enough. For instance, while kids will get a notification when they’ve spent 60 minutes on the app, they will be able to bypass it and continue scrolling.

That’s unless the child’s parents turn on “parental supervision” mode, where parents can limit teens’ time on Instagram to a specific amount of time, such as 15 minutes.

With the latest changes, Meta is giving parents more options to oversee their kids’ accounts. Those under 16 will need a parent or guardian’s permission to change their settings to less restrictive ones. They can do this by setting up “parental supervision” on their accounts and connecting them to a parent or guardian.

Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said last week that parents don’t use the parental controls the company has introduced in recent years.

Gleit said she thinks teen accounts will create a “big incentive for parents and teens to set up parental supervision.”

“Parents will be able to see, via the family center, who is messaging their teen and hopefully have a conversation with their teen,” she said. “If there is bullying or harassment happening, parents will have visibility into who their teen’s following, who’s following their teen, who their teen has messaged in the past seven days and hopefully have some of these conversations and help them navigate these really difficult situations online.”

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said last year that tech companies put too much on parents when it comes to keeping children safe on social media.

“We’re asking parents to manage a technology that’s rapidly evolving that fundamentally changes how their kids think about themselves, how they build friendships, how they experience the world — and technology, by the way, that prior generations never had to manage,” Murthy said in May 2023.

Dura-Europos Church is widely considered to be the oldest in existence. 

More specifically, Dura-Europos is known as the world’s oldest Christian house church, as it was originally constructed as a home before converting into a church. 

A house church is defined as a place where people gather for worship together in a private home.

THIS CONNECTICUT AMUSEMENT PARK IS THE OLDEST IN THE UNITED STATES

Since Dura-Europos was not originally constructed as a church, there are historians that don’t believe it should hold that status that it widely does.

That said, there are still many sources that credit Dura-Europos with the “world’s oldest” title. The church is named the oldest church building by Guinness World Records. 

The church was built in the city of Dura-Europos, near the village of Salihiyah in modern-day Syria. The church was built somewhere between 233 and 256 AD, according to Christianity.com

In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of American and French archaeologists, led by Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, excavated the area where thousands of artifacts, including frescoes, were unearthed. Fresco painting is a “method of painting water-based pigments on freshly applied plaster, usually on wall surfaces,” according to Britannica. 

Dura-Europos Church was built in modern-day Syria, but is now in ruins.  (PHAS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

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Excavating the city led to the discovery of an unearthed synagogue, a Christian building and Mithraeum, plus over 12,000 artifacts that are preserved at Yale University today, according to the Ivy League’s website. 

The paintings found during excavation are among the artifacts that now live at Yale University and are considered some of the oldest Christian paintings ever discovered.

One of these is a piece that was found in the baptistery, which was discovered in three fragments. 

Today, the church is left in ruins in an area controlled by ISIS, according to Christianity.com.

One of many pieces of religious artwork found in Dura-Europos was the piece pictured here. The photo displays one of three fragments that were found.  (Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

As for the oldest church in the United States, many sources consider it to be San Miguel Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  

The Catholic Church dates back to 1610. The chapel has been reconstructed many times since it’s creation and is still in operation today.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s popularity ratings are some of the lowest ever recorded by a German leader at just 18%, according to a survey published in September by Infratest Dimap.

By contrast, long-standing Chancellor Angela Merkel largely enjoyed a median confidence rating of 76% over her 16-year term — with her lowest-ever approval rating dropping to 46% following her open-border policies during the 2016 refugee crisis.

Scholz, who is the head of a deeply divided three-way coalition government, has found his popularity plummet, culminating in his party scoring a low 14% of the vote in the European elections in June — behind both Germany’s major opposition party and fringe parties such as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Although Scholz’s popularity is particularly low, other European leaders are not faring much better, with many of the continent’s most recognisable faces scoring low according to available polling data collected over the past three months in their respective countries.

Why are Europeans upset with their leaders?

Although the measure of each leader’s popularity is often due to circumstances in their own country, Jan Kubik, director of the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London, told Euronews that a general sense of disappointment with “politics as usual” may be responsible for leader’s generally low ratings in Europe.

“There is a palpable sense of malaise caused by the perception that the world is not in good shape, and nobody knows how to improve the situation,” Kubik said, adding that Europe also has a shortage of “positive visionaries” in its political landscape which is marred by two major wars and increasing popularity of the far-right.

However, some leaders can breathe a sigh of relief that their approval ratings are not much lower than those of their predecessors.

Kubik notes that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has seen trust slowly erode since taking office. However, so far, distrust in him is not as high as it was for the leader of the former ruling Law and Justice, or PiS party, and Tusk’s main political rival, Jarosław Kaczyński.

The gradual erosion of trust in Tusk could be explained by looking at Poland’s ever-increasing polarisation, according to Kubik, as well as Tusk’s controversial attempts to repair damage to democracy done by his right-wing predecessors from PiS — a process which involves him grappling with rules introduced by Poland’s former government.

“The slowness and hardly comprehensible complexity of this process result in the growing perception that the government is incompetent,” Kubik said.

French President Emmanuel Macron, whose latest approval rating was just 30%, is also not alone in his unpopularity within France, where leaders have historically been unpopular. In 2016, former French President François Hollande famously scored just 4% of support.

Nevertheless, French political analyst Francois Valentin told Euronews that Macron has made himself disliked in France by publicly placing himself at the centre of political decisions — leaving himself open to considerable backlash if his government’s choices end up not resonating with the French public.

“It worked to his advantage when he was new, now its working against him. Especially now that he is increasingly isolated, even within his own political sphere,” Valentin said.

As for Scholz, his lack of presence on the public stage has been often cited as a reason for his unpopularity.

“Many people miss him at the public stage, explaining his decisions and the policies of the federal government to the voters. He does not appear to be very responsive to public demands either,” Antonios Souris, political scientist at the Freie University in Berlin, explained.

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“There were periods this year in which he seemed to completely disappear.”