• by Colin Kirkland , March 25, 2025

Following its rollout of “Teen Accounts” -- which give parents of teens more control over their childrens' social media use -- Instagram is inviting U.S. middle and high schools to report in-app teen safety issues directly to Meta for faster content moderation actions.

Instagram's purpose for its new “School Partnership Program” is linked to the Cyberbullying Research Center's (CRC) view that educators are often unable to do anything effective in response to a student's in-app cyberbullying complaint.

The tech giant is attempting to provide schools with a direct line of communication to its content-moderation team so targeted content can be quickly taken down.

Over the past year, Instagram has been working with the International Society for Technology in Education and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development to test its new program with 60 schools.

Now, more schools will have access to prioritized reporting and status updates on the reports and notifications as soon as Instagram takes action, the company says.

Instagram will also provide resources that aim to aid educators, parents, guardians and students in safely navigating Instagram, and will apply a profile banner to school partners to alert students and parents that they are an official Instagram partner.

If someone taps the school profile banner, they will see more information about the program.

It is too soon to say how effective the partnership opportunities will be to combat cyberbullying, especially since only 13% of targeted youth report being cyberbullied to their school, according to the CRC.

However, Meta does quote one middle school in San Jose, California that claims it witnessed bullying and harassing posts and profiles being taken down within the first week of its partnership with Instagram.

Still, while Meta rolls out more parent-accessible safety tools for its youngest users, the company has also committed to eradicating third-party fact-checking, which its own Safety Council believes will put the most vulnerable users across Facebook, Instagram and Threads at risk for harassment.

Aligning with U.S. President Donald Trump's “free speech” mission, Meta has begun rolling out Community Notes -- a user-powered content-moderation approach used on X and widely criticized by researchers for being ineffective.