My Role

Product strategy and design for foundational teen safety protections on Threads. Defined baseline defaults, age-based protections, and communication. Partnered with Product, Engineering, Legal, Content Design, and Central Youth teams.

What shipped

A unified system of baseline protections for teens across all Threads account types, including age-tiered defaults, new safety settings, and graduation experiences. Enabled Threads to support teen users independently of Instagram.

The impact

Unlocked teen growth on Threads while maintaining a consistent safety bar. Enabled the launch of Threads accounts for users under 18 in the EU, onboarding 3,190 teens in the first five days after launch, while establishing a foundation for future supervision and regulatory compliance.

Goals

• Establish a consistent baseline of protections for all teens on Threads

• Achieve parity with Instagram’s teen protections, adapted to Threads architecture

• Differentiate protections by age tier (early teens 13–15 vs. late teens 16–17)

• Clearly communicate protections to teens and parents, alleviating concern about account decoupling

• Enable future supervision and safety features without rework

Scope and constraints

• Needed to work across multiple account types (IG-connected, Facebook-connected, Threads-only)

• Required multiple rounds of alignment with Legal, Policy and Central Youth

• Had to support account migration and decoupling from Instagram/Facebook

• Competing timelines for account migration and Facebook-connected account launch, requiring tight coordination across multiple teams

• Limited engineering resources required prioritization, speed and coordination across teams

Audited and defined the baseline

• Audited all safety-related settings across Instagram and Threads for early and late teens as well as adults

• Mapped teen and adult defaults across Instagram and Threads to understand what protections existed and where gaps would emerge

• Identified gaps and inconsistencies in how protections were applied

• Defined new teen default states for each setting by age tier

Collaborating across teams and roles

• Drove alignment with Legal on the proposed defaults, working through which settings early teens should be locked into, what happens when a teen ages up and how to handle existing teens whose settings don't match the new default

• Presented the strategy to Threads trust and safety Design leads and got alignment on the approach before moving into detailed designs

• Partnered with content design on a communication strategy for parents and teens. Parents needed to understand what protections were in place before supervision was available and teens needed clear language when they hit a restriction

Solutions

Age-tiered protection system

• Early teens: strict defaults (private accounts, restricted content, limited controls)

• Late teens: soft defaults (same baseline protections with increased flexibility)

Graduation experiences

Seamless transitions when aging up from early to late teen (silently allowing them to update safety settings) and late teen to adult (switching to adult defaults with a notification).

Threads-native screen time settings

Introduced time management as standalone Threads settings which enabled teens to manage daily limit and sleep mode independently of Instagram.

• Enabled launch of threads-only accounts for users under 18. Onboarded 3,190 teens in the first five days post-launch

• Enabled a new acquisition pathway through U18 Facebook-connected accounts, supporting Threads’s growth strategy

• Launched daily limit and sleep mode as standalone thread settings, unlocking a key capability for responding to youth regulations with a time spent component

• Laid the foundation for account decoupling and future supervision features

• Delivered all P0 goals supporting Threads’s 2025 growth objectives for youth