When Meta announced a set of safeguards for teen users of Instagram last September, it reassured parents that the “built-in protections” would give them “peace of mind. 

“We know parents want to feel confident that their teens can use social media to connect with their friends and explore their interests, without having to worry about unsafe or inappropriate experiences,” the company said.

But new research by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) finds that the “Instagram Teen Accounts” actually point young users to a type of content that Meta explicitly promised to restrict: fight videos.

TTP tested what a 15-year-old test user got when they searched Instagram for the word “fight.” Instagram limited fight content to varying degrees across the For You, Accounts, and Reels tabs, but it recommended a hashtag—#fight—which led directly to an array of violent and gory videos. These included videos of kids punching each other, men engaged in bloody street fighting, and dogs tearing at each other’s throats.

The fact that Meta served up this hashtag to a teen user undermines its statements about protecting minors on Instagram. The company says that 13- to 17-year olds are automatically placed into the most restrictive Instagram settings that limit “sensitive content” including “people fighting.” But TTP found that Instagram did not apply the restrictions to hashtags, which are a key way that people discover content on the platform.

This loophole raises questions about the effectiveness of the Instagram Teen Accounts, which are a centerpiece of Meta’s efforts to show it is committed to child safety. The company has heavily promoted the teen safeguards as it comes under growing legislative and legal pressure over its impact on children’s mental health.

Meta did not respond to TTP’s request for comment. In a statement to The Washington Post, which covered this report, the company said the Instagram Teen Accounts are “broadly working as intended, though search results may vary based on the specific queries.” The company added  that it removed some violating content.

However, following that statement, TTP found that when the 15-year-old user account did the same search for “fight” on Instagram, the platform showed more fight content than appeared during the initial test, with no warnings attached.

To test Instagram’s teen safeguards, TTP set up an Instagram account for a hypothetical 15-year-old boy, using a new email account to avoid biasing results. Testing was conducted on a newly activated iPhone with a fresh SIM card, on June 11, 2025. During the setup process, the hypothetical teen followed the first 30 accounts recommended by Instagram. All of the followed accounts were for internet personalities, celebrities, and professional sports teams.

TTP focused its test on fighting content, which is one of the “sensitive” topics that Meta explicitly promised to restrict for teen users. Researchers had the hypothetical 15-year-old search Instagram for the word “fight” and examined the results returned under For You, Accounts, Reels, Tags, and Places tabs.

In choosing a 15-year-old boy for the test, TTP was guided by a March 2024 report on children and online violence from UK communications regulator Ofcom, which found that boys aged 13 to 15 were the most likely to seek out violent content. The report also found that Instagram was among the platforms that kids used for that purpose.

(The Instagram Teen Accounts, rolled out in September 2024, included multiple measures, some previously announced by the company, like making teen accounts private by default and restricting teen messaging. This report looks specifically at the Instagram Teen Accounts content restrictions around fighting.)

The teen test user’s Instagram search for “fight” produced a series of fight videos under the For You tab, though the violent content was limited. The videos included people pushing and shoving each other; moments of posturing before a professional fight; clips of professional fights and martial arts demonstrations; and highlights from movies like Fight Club. The one exception was a still image of a professional fighter's head and torso covered in blood.

The Accounts tab showed an account called @fight and a message that read, “We’ve hidden most results for your search because they may contain sensitive content.” The @fight account showed mostly promotional material for Ultimate Fighting Championship fights, including videos of professional fighters training and interviews with UFC fighters. The Reels and Places tabs showed the same sensitive content warning with no results.

The Tags tab, however, showed the hashtag #fight, which encompassed 20.1 million Instagram posts. It was accompanied by the same sensitive content message, but nothing prevented the teen user from clicking on #fight. When the teen user clicked on the hashtag, Instagram generated a new set of search results that included hundreds of videos of school fights, street fights, gruesome dog fights and other violent content.

One video that was among the top results for #fight under the For You tab shows two men throwing rapid-fire punches at each other outside some kind of retail establishment at night. Another shows two dogs tearing at each other’s heads and throats in a dimly lit space while people kick them to encourage them to fight. 

Instagram returned similar results for #fight under the other tabs. None of them showed the sensitive content message that appeared in the original search, and Instagram took no action to restrict the content for the 15-year-old despite knowing the user’s age.

The Accounts tab, for example, showed dozens of Instagram accounts with “fight” in their name. Many of these indicated they were related to school fights. While some of the school-related accounts were private, TTP examined the public accounts and found they were filled with videos of school-age kids engaged in fights, apparently filmed by classmates.

One of the accounts, “schoolfight2394,” featured a video of a teenage boy ambushing another outside a classroom. In the ensuing fight, one boy repeatedly punches the other and stomps on his head after he falls to the floor. The video, posted in April 2022, has more than 20,000 views.

Another account, “oms.schoolfights,” encourages followers to “Send video’s [sic] of people fighting.” The account has a Stories Highlights button that shows video snippets of students—both girls and boys—fighting on school grounds. One of the snippets shows a series of individual fist fights breaking out in a crowd of students surging toward a line of school buses, as police officers try to intervene. (The Highlights preserve “favorite moments” from Instagram Stories, which disappear after 24 hours.)

The availability of this #fight content runs counter to Meta’s promises about the Instagram Teen Accounts. In its September 2024 announcement about the teen safeguards, Meta said under-18 users would automatically be placed in “the most restrictive setting” that limits the type of “sensitive content” they see, including “people fighting.” The announcement says nothing about an exception for hashtags.

Meta may be violating some of its other standards by serving up this content. The company says it removes “graphically violent” content on its platforms for all users and avoids recommending content that depicts “violence, such as people fighting.”

Other accounts generated by the #fight search focused on knockout fights, where at least one participant is knocked to the ground. On such account, “_knockout_fights_,” boasts it has the “Hottest Fight Vids Out Right Now.” Many of its videos show street fights ending with someone being punched so hard they collapse.

One video featured on the account shows two young men fighting in a bathroom. One man knocks the other to the ground and continues punching and kicking his head. Another video shows two young men engaged on a fist fight on a residential street. When one man falls on his back, the other keeps punching him. The accompanying text says “Night Night.”

Both of these videos are marked with multiple hashtags, including like #worldstarfights, #knockout, #destroyed, and even #sensitivecontent. These help Instagram users easily find other fight videos. The #sensitivecontent hashtag is using Meta’s own terminology about content restrictions as a pointer to violent videos.

Clicking on these additional hashtags led our teen user to yet more violent videos, with no restrictions from Meta. For example, the hashtag #knockout generated a series of Reels videos of one teenage boy knocking out another; a professional fighter getting kicked unconscious and blood dripping out of his mouth; and a backyard fight between two men that leaves one with his face bloodied and eye swollen shut.

In a similar vein, the Tags tab of the #fight search showed dozens of additional fight-related hashtags that the 15-year-old test user could freely access. These included #fightvideos, #hoodfight, and #dogfight. Clicking on any of these hashtags produced a series of fresh results with new fighting videos.

Take the hashtag #dogfight, which encompassed 206,0000 Instagram posts. Clicking the hashtag led the teen user to dozens of graphic dogfighting videos under the For You tab. The videos showed a pack of dogs biting and tearing at another dog until it goes limp; two dogs attacking each other in a dark room illuminated by flashlight; and a dog biting and violently shaking a smaller, unidentified animal.

Warning: The following slides contain images that some readers may find disturbing. Click on individual slides to view.

Meta has been scrutinized for years about the presence of dogfighting and other forms of animal cruelty on its platforms. The company says it puts a warning screen over certain kinds of animal cruelty and blocks images of “injured animals suffering” for users under 18—none of which occurred with the examples highlighted above.

TTP’s test shows that a teenage boy can find fighting videos on Instagram in just a few clicks without encountering any resistance from the platform. After searching for “fight,” the teen test user just had to click once on the Tags tab and a second time on the hashtag #fight to enter a world of brutal fight content. The teen could then click other hashtags to access more fight videos. These findings show that the Instagram Teen Accounts—which Meta holds up as an effective child safety feature—fails to shield minors from “inappropriate” content as promised by the company. In fact, Meta actually served up the hashtag #fight to our test teen, pushing the young user toward the very content it promised to restrict.

Note: Updated with Meta comment to The Washington Post.