2026
Helping teens avoid inappropriate content
Teens across the globe use Facebook and Messenger every day to connect with family, manage school activities and explore extracurricular interests. Both they and their guardians expect to be able to do so without being exposed to age-inappropriate content or accounts.
In 2025 I led an app-wide initiative to give teens and their guardians stronger default protections and more robust options to manage the content their teens see and profiles they can interact with.
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: My work at Meta focused on highly sensitive trust and safety initiatives which are subject to strict NDAs. Did I read them? No. Am I scared of them? Yes.
As such much of my work including, iterative design explorations, specific workflows and non-published metric impacts cannot be shared publicly.
The challenge
While Facebook had a wide array of protections to ensure teens had safe experience on the platform, many of the existing solutions lacked cross-surface scope, were hard to understand or didn’t filter content and profiles in the way guardians expected.
In addition, both teens and guardians wanted more ability to directly control the strength of content and profile filtering across Meta apps.
My Role
I initially joined the Facebook Empowerment product team to lead design on an enforcement and remediation experience for age-inappropriate accounts, but ultimately scaled my scope to lead a holistic teen safety redesign across Facebook.
Contributions
-
Proactively identified key gaps in existing solutions and user expectations, and led the creation of a cohesive, design-first strategy, to holistically address them.
-
Translated strategy into a tangible, research and data backed north star vision which ultimately influenced cross-functional partners and app leadership to pivot key aspects of existing strategy for experience and safety wins.
-
Successfully advocated for and coordinated the scoping of the 6-month MVP effort across 8 product teams, directly driving design for two teams while overseeing 5 other individual contributors across all other work streams.
-
Led a 6-month effort, operationalizing design work under a single umbrella, establishing cadences, shared tracking, grooming and road mapping across design and cross-functional teams and working with design managers across FB for additional staffing and prioritization where needed.
What we Shipped
A new age-specific content setting for teens and parents
We designed and launched a net-new content setting for teens which more closely aligns Facebook’s baseline teen experiences with research-based user expectations of age-appropriate content across Feed, Reels and Search. We also used a number of predictive signals to determine the most likely optimal selection and opted teen accounts into that selections at launch.
Age-gated accounts
For accounts that produce high volumes of the age-inappropriate content (which the setting filters) we designed a transparent gating experience for teens attempting to view or message them, even if previous connections existed.
Transparency and Remediation for age-gated accounts
For accounts impacted by the content control we shipped a robust end-to-end transparency experience, informing them of why they were age-gated, what that means in terms of their access to Facebook, and giving them paths to remediate if they feel a mistake was made.
Lots of other stuff I can’t show here
There were a myriad of more confidential features which can’t be disclosed publicly but represented significant design and experience challenges across some of Facebook’s most high-touch surfaces.
Outcomes and impact
The work above was launched in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada in Q1 2026, with global roll out following in late Q2, seeing meaningful impact in key areas among teens and their guardians.
While I can’t share specific metrics, these publicly-published numbers from across the family of apps are representative of the impact this work had on driving safer and more appropriate experiences for teens across Facebook.
Reach
54M+
Features are rolled out to 54M teen accounts across apps.
Exposure Decrease
60-90%
Teen accounts saw a reduction of 60-90% less age-inappropriate content.
Satisfaction
9/10
90% of teen accounts did not change their new default content setting post-rollout.
Read more
