Instagram Teen Accounts ‘fail to protect children’, according to a new report from the Molly Rose Foundation, which claims that the social media platform’s teen safety features are mostly ineffective.

Following a systematic review of Instagram’s list of teen safety features, the Foundation’s report, Teen Accounts, Broken Promises: How Instagram is Failing to Protect Minors, alleges that less than 1 in 5 are fully functional, which the charity said is leaving children at risk of harmful content and abuse.

Working alongside Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar, as well as academics from NYU and Northeastern University in the US and a host of child safety groups, the study claims that 64% of Instagram’s safety features are either ‘substantially ineffective or no longer exist’.

The Molly Rose Foundation, a suicide prevention charity targeted towards young people, said that the analysis ‘dramatically undermines Meta’s claims that its often-referenced safety features adequately protect teens on Instagram’, and suggests that Teen Accounts provide ‘false reassurances’ to parents.

“Parents should know, the Teen Accounts charade is made from broken promises,” said Arturo Béjar, former senior staffer at Meta turned whistleblower.

“Meta’s conscious product design and implementation choices are selecting, promoting, and bringing inappropriate content, contact, and compulsive use to children every day.”

Among the report’s claims are that users of Teen Accounts are able to view content that promotes suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, with autocomplete suggestions recommending search terms and accounts related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and illegal substances.

The Molly Rose Foundation contends that those with Teen Accounts are able to send and receive ‘grossly offensive and misogynistic’ comments and messages to one another, despite promised interventions by the platform.

The most serious allegations made in the report are perhaps that Instagram’s algorithm incentivises children under-13 to perform sexualised behaviours for likes and views, with the charity contending that they are encouraged to post content that receives highly sexualised comments from adults.

According to the study, thirty out of 47 safety tools tested were given a red rating as being non-existent or ineffective, while a further nine were given a yellow rating, meaning they reduced harm but came with limitations.

Meta’s policies lay out the safety frameworks for Teen Accounts, which are designed to limit who can contact young adults and view the content they see, as well as restrict the use Instagram Live.

When launching Teen Accounts, Meta said that these would have built-in protections limiting who can contact teen users and see their content, including private accounts, messaging restrictions, and sensitive content restrictions, with parental permission needed to change settings for under 16s.

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“Our findings suggest that Teen Accounts are a PR driven performative stunt rather than a clear and concerted attempt to fix long-running safety risks on Instagram,” said Andy Burrows, chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation.

“These failings point to a corporate culture at Meta that puts engagement and profit before safety and pays lip service to doing the right thing.”

The report urges Meta to fix the tools, and for regulators around the world to respond, including in the UK, where the new technology secretary, Liz Kendall, recently said the Government would toughen the flagship Online Safety Act by introducing stricter legal requirements on tech companies.

Responding to the claims a spokesperson for Meta said: “This report repeatedly misrepresents our efforts to empower parents and protect teens, misstating how our safety tools work and how millions of parents and teens are using them today.

“Teen Accounts lead the industry because they provide automatic safety protections and straightforward parental controls. The reality is teens who were placed into these protections saw less sensitive content, experienced less unwanted contact, and spent less time on Instagram at night. Parents also have robust tools at their fingertips, from limiting usage to monitoring interactions. We’ll continue improving our tools, and we welcome constructive feedback – but this report is not that.”

According to the tech firm, there is a long list of issues with this analysis, including inaccurately describing some safety features as ‘discontinued’ when they have been incorporated into newer, updated versions, and a ‘misunderstanding and mischaracterisation’ of other tested features.