Updates to the Sensitive Content Control

Updated August 25, 2022

The Sensitive Content Control has only two options for teens: “Standard” and “Less.” New teens on Instagram under 16 years old will be defaulted into the “Less” state. For teens already on Instagram, we will send a prompt encouraging them to select the “Less” experience.

This will make it more difficult for young people to come across potentially sensitive content or accounts in Search, Explore, Hashtag Pages, Reels, Feed Recommendations and Suggested Accounts.

In addition, we are testing a new way to encourage teens to update their safety and privacy settings. We’ll show prompts asking teens to review their settings including: controlling who can reshare their content, who can message and contact them, what content they can see and how they can manage their time spent on Instagram.

These updates are some of the ways we are working to protect teens on Instagram.

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We’re continuously developing controls to help people personalize their experience on Instagram. Last summer, we launched the Sensitive Content Control so people could choose how much or how little sensitive content to see in Explore from accounts they don’t follow. Today, we’re announcing updates to this control.

Starting today, the Sensitive Content Control will cover all surfaces where we make recommendations. In addition to Explore, you will now be able to control the amount of sensitive content and accounts you see in Search, Reels, Accounts You Might Follow, Hashtag Pages and In-Feed Recommendations. With this update, we’re also applying the technology we use to enforce our Recommendation Guidelines to Instagram's recommendations on Search and Hashtag pages. This update will be available to everyone in the coming weeks.

The Sensitive Content Control has three options, which we’ve renamed from when we first introduced the control to help explain what each option does. The three options are: “More”, “Standard” and “Less”.

“Standard” is the default state, and will prevent people from seeing some sensitive content and accounts. “More” enables people to see more sensitive content and accounts, whereas “Less” means they see less of this content than the default state. For people under the age of 18, the “More” option is unavailable.

To view your Sensitive Content Control:

1. Go to your profile.
2. Tap the Settings menu in the upper right corner.
3. Tap Account.
4. Tap Sensitive Content Control. Here you can decide whether to keep the setting at its default state (“Standard”) or to see more (“More”) or less of some types of sensitive content (“Less”). You can change your selection at any time.

There are additional tools we offer that can help you shape your Instagram experience, including Comment Control, Restrict, Block and Mute. Our hope is to provide more tools over time and make Instagram work better for you. For more information about Instagram’s Sensitive Content Control, you can visit the Instagram Help Center.