Instagram said Thursday it will start alerting parents if their kids repeatedly search for terms clearly associated with suicide or self-harm. The alerts will only go to parents who are enrolled in Instagram’s parental supervision program.
Instagram says it already blocks such content from showing up in teen accounts’ search results and directs people to helplines instead.
The announcement comes as Meta is in the midst of two trials over harms to children. A trial underway in Los Angeles questions whether Meta’s platforms deliberately addict and harm minors. Another, in New Mexico, seeks to determine whether Meta failed to protect kids from sexual exploitation on its platforms. Thousands of families — along with school districts and government entities — have sued Meta and other social media companies claiming they deliberately design their platforms to be addictive and fail to protect kids from content that can lead to depression, eating disorders and suicide.
Meta executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg have disputed that the platforms cause addiction. During questioning by the plaintiff’s lawyer, in Los Angeles, Zuckerberg said he still agrees with a previous statement he made that the existing body of scientific work has not proved that social media causes mental health harms.
The alerts will be sent via email, text or WhatsApp, depending on the parent's contact information available, as well as a notification through the parent's Instagram account.
“Our goal is to empower parents to step in if their teen’s searches suggest they may need support. We also want to avoid sending these notifications unnecessarily, which, if done too much, could make the notifications less useful overall,” Meta said in a blog post.
Meta said it is also working on similar notifications to parents about their kids' interactions with artificial intelligence.
“These will notify parents if a teen attempts to engage in certain types of conversations related to suicide or self-harm with our AI,” Meta said. “This is important work and we’ll have more to share in the coming months.”
FILE - The Instagram logo is seen on a cell phone in Boston, Oct. 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Attorneys for Kilmar Abrego Garcia will try to persuade a federal judge in Tennessee on Thursday to throw out human smuggling charges against him.
Abrego Garcia, whose mistaken deportation has galvanized both sides of the immigration debate, claims that the criminal prosecution is vindictive, pushed by officials from President Donald Trump's administration to punish him after they were forced to bring him back to the United States.
While Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran citizen, a court order from 2019 prevents him from being deported to that country. That's because an immigration judge determined he faced danger in El Salvador from a gang that had threatened his family. Abrego Garcia, 30, immigrated to the U.S. illegally as a teenager but has an American wife and child. He has lived and worked in Maryland for years under the supervision of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
After he was deported to El Salvador last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration had to work to bring him back. He was eventually returned to the U.S. only to face criminal charges of human smuggling based on a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty.
Body camera footage from a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer shows a calm exchange with Abrego Garcia after he was pulled over for speeding. There were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling. However, Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving with only a warning.
U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw previously found some evidence that the prosecution against Abrego Garcia “may be vindictive.” The judge said many statements by Trump administration officials “raise cause for concern.” He cited a statement by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that seemed to suggest the Department of Justice charged Abrego Garcia because he won his wrongful-deportation case.
Abrego Garcia's attorneys have been sparring with prosecutors for months over whether officials like Blanche would be required to testify at Thursday's hearing and what emails Department of Justice officials would have to turn over to them. First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee Rob McGuire has argued that he alone made the decision to prosecute, so the motives of other officials were irrelevant.
Crenshaw reviewed many of the disputed documents. In an order that was unsealed in late December, he wrote, “Some of the documents suggest not only that McGuire was not a solitary decision-maker, but he in fact reported to others in DOJ and the decision to prosecute Abrego may have been a joint decision.”
FILE - Kilmar Abrego Garcia speaks during a rally ahead of a mandatory check at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Baltimore, Dec. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough, File)
