With a Teen Account, teens will need to choose whether or not to accept new followers and can only receive messages from people they follow or are already connected to. (Meta told TechCrunch that Instagram considers a teen connected to someone if they are friends on another Meta platform like Facebook or Messenger, or if they accepted a DM request from them in the past to chat but didn’t follow them.)
Teens can also only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow. Plus, the app will automatically filter out offensive words and phrases from a teen’s DMs and comments on their posts.