**Jump to the section showing parents how to find Finsta accounts.
Finsta and Spam Accounts Aren’t New
In August 2016, The National Cybersecurity Alliance in cooperation with Microsoft released the results of their study of online safety attitudes and behaviors of parents and teens. Researchers interviewed 804 teens between the ages of 13 and 17 and a separate group of 810 parents, discovering a “complex relationship” between the groups and obvious signs of the digital disconnect regarding knowledge and understanding.
One of the most illustrative representations of this disconnect surfaced in their finding that “60 percent of teen internet users have created online accounts that their parents are unaware of – more than double the 28 percent of online parents who suspect their teens have secret accounts.”
I’ve written extensively about Instagram, offering my thoughts on its risks (many) and benefits (few). There are two important trends about how kids use Instagram that parents should pay attention to.
Related post: Instagram has a massive porn problem. It’s time for action!
What is a Finsta Account on Instagram?
Before reading this section, it’s important for parents to know that not all fake accounts are bad. Don’t jump to conclusions! Did you have a secret diary? Yes. Some kids need a few places where they can be a bit more honest.
- Finsta – a “fake” or secondary Instagram account. This type of account can be used for a wide range of activities, including undercover bullying or simply wanting to only share certain photos with a certain sub-set of very best friends.
- Spam account – teens create an Instagram “spam” account specifically for sharing their more personal, unpolished, rough pictures with their inner circle. In other words, a “spam” account is a type of finsta. The term spam comes from the username of the secondary account, which usually includes the word “spam” along with their handle. For example, “spam__chrisw.”
The term “Finstas” has been around for a few years now, but these types of accounts really took off in 2016 when Instagram allowed users to link up multiple accounts under one profile. Prior to this, users had to create an entirely new profile then log on and off to switch between them in the app, which was a pain.
Now, on Instagram, users can add up to five different accounts and manage them under one profile. Each account is separate with its own email, username, and profile information. Teens can now easily toggle back and forth between their “real” and “spam” account.
Finsta and Spam FAQ
Parents might have some of the following questions.
Why Have a Finsta Account?
It comes down to one word—image. By hitting the gas pedal in a car, you rev the engine, causing the car to go faster. Social media revs the popularity engine. Kids work tirelessly to craft and manage a social media image that revs strong and loud. Even if it requires taking 150 selfies in order to find the perfect duck face.
What Can Go Wrong With a Finsta Account?
For younger Instagram users, finsta accounts usually contain silly and/or raw and embarrassing photos. But, for older users, these accounts might contain photos displaying riskier behavior like drinking and partying. Kids need to be aware of the reputation risks that exist even if the photos are only shared with good friends. Friendship change and revenge is tempting. What if a teacher or coach became aware of those pictures? These are real risks with real consequence.
Anonymous bullying is also a risk with Finsta accounts. When kids believe that no one will be able to figure out who is saying certain things, the temptation to say mean and cruel things increases significantly. A fake account allows kids to use that account to leave comments that can really hurt other kids.
By maintaining multiple accounts, kids are also practicing the behavior of wearing multiple masks. Growing up is hard enough. Why bear the additional burden of managing multiple personas?
How can Parents Guard Against Finstas?
Keep that doorway to conversation wide open. I find that whatever gets talked about openly and honestly usually has less deceptive power over us. For example, a conversation with your daughter might be:
“Honey, you and I both know that you could create five different Instagram accounts without me ever knowing about it. But, I really don’t want you to do that. We have built up trust and I want to keep that. Plus, the risks of someone getting their hands on risky photos is just too great with screenshots, revenge, etc.”
Inspect your kid’s devices from time to time. **These steps are very important.
- Open Instagram and look for multiple profiles. You can do this by tapping on their profile in the lower right (see image below).
- If they’re logged into multiple Instagram accounts, there will be a drop-down arrow next to their username at the top. I’ve shown both of my accounts in the drop-down in the picture below. The second and most overlooked way to check for a Finsta is to go into the account that you do know about (the one they’ve told you about) and check all of the accounts that are following them and that they are following. Question anything you don’t recognize or that looks unusual.
- If they have multiple accounts, there’s a good chance they’re following it in some way. A highly motivated kid could log in and out and never follow any of his multiple accounts and effectively hide the activity. But, regular and unpredictable searches of the device, along with persistent and consistent conversation, are more likely than not to uncover something….eventually.
**Wait! Chris, did you just recommend that I perform random searches of my kid’s Internet-ready device? Absolutely. If dad is paying for the service, then every device on the plan is co-owned. That’s the house rule. No matter who bought the iPhone or who received it as a birthday or Christmas gift. Co-ownership is mandatory.
Ask yourself – is 13 the right age for my kid? Just because Instagram’s rules state that users must be at least 13 to have an account, that doesn’t mean every 13-year-old is ready for Instagram. Remember, in addition to some of the fake account risks we’ve discussed here, Instagram has many other risks and an overall lack of parental controls that do not make it a prime platform for entry into the social media world. Can your kid handle the risks? Maybe.
Related Post: What’s the Right Age to Give My Kid Social Media?
Our Recommended Parental Control Solution for Instagram: BARK
Although Instagram doesn’t have any parental controls of its own, the BARK app gives parents peace of mind by automatically letting parents know of potentially inappropriate activity on Instagram and Snapchat accounts. BARK monitors the images and videos kids upload and also the comments on those posts. Additionally, Bark’s algorithm detects language including “fake” or “finsta” in the comments, alerting parents. It’s awesome!
*There are affiliate links throughout this post because we’ve tested and trust a small list of parental control solutions. Our work saves you time! If you decide that you agree with us, then we may earn a small commission, which does nothing to your price. Enjoy!
Chris McKenna, Founder: A man with never-ending energy when it comes to fighting for the safety and protection of children. Chris practices his internet safety tips on his four amazing children and is regularly featured on news, radio, and podcasts for his research. His 2019 US Senate Judiciary Committee testimony was the catalyst for draft legislation and ongoing discussion that could radically change online child protection laws and earned PYE the NCOSE Dignity Defense Alert Award in 2020. The PYE team has performed over 1,700 presentations at schools, churches, and nonprofits and was featured in the Childhood 2.0 movie. Other loves include running, spreadsheets, nature, and candy.
Thank you and may God bless you for pioneering a way for parents to protect their children from satan’s agenda to destroy their lives.
Grace and peace to you!
My question is this: will Bark or any app track the direct messages kids send on Instagram and Facebook messenger? That’s where the predators groom your child. Your child is hitting “like 4 tbh” and getting a DM saying TBH I think you’re gorgeous and I want to get to know you better. Your young girl is so excited because a cute boy likes her. She will do anything to get to know him better. He may spend months grooming her, telling her sad stories about how his beast friend killed himself, or his mother’s boyfriend beats him, he has no friends and she is the only one he can really open up to. Young girls are stupid. They think they are building a real relationship. They don’t believe those are all lies meant to gain their trust. It could be months later when. A guy like that finally asks for and convinces a girl to start sending him pics, and then it gets worse from there. Especially when your daughter agrees to meet the person you are unaware of face to face. This happens to a lot of girls and boys. It has happened to my daughters.
As a parent, I’ve been diligent in checking their devices for second accounts and such, but if they DAM someone and delete the messages, there is really nothing I can do about that . For me, that’s where the real danger lies.
Hello, I’m so sorry that you’ve had first-hand experience with this. Unmoderated chat and direct message is a huge risk – you’re absolutely correct. I’ve sent a message to Bark to confirm my understanding of how the solution works before I give you an answer. I’ll send another reply once they get back to me.
Best, Chris
Looking through through someone’s PRIVATE belongings destroys a sense of privacy and trust. If your child is old enough for technology you should trust them. This sort of stuff is for paranoid yuppie parents who feel the need to babysit their children and teenagers and force their beliefs upon them. As long as teens know the risks of things like nudes, sexting and cyber bullying most are completely fine, spam accounts are not a bad thing, they are a way to emotionally vent when there aren’t enough people at home to vent to, or if they don’t feel comfortable doing that around parents. Taking away their privacy will then destroy their sense of trust, therefore not fixing the problem.
Well, since it sounds like you’re a teenager, then I’m not surprised that we will come at this from different points of view. Nothing is private online. I also don’t believe that many teens can handle the pressures of the internet. I base this on being a parent and 20+ years working with families. You’ve made assertions that what I propose breaks trust. What are you basing this on? Maybe your parents have handled privacy and digital monitoring incorrectly. Maybe trust has been broken with your parents. If so, I’m sorry about that. But, that doesn’t mean all parents should just stop monitoring their kids. Instagram, Snapchat, and other apps weren’t made for teens. Please be careful.
Chris
Teens can be responsible– and privacy is important to us just like it is to anyone else. We aren’t crazy, hormone driven monsters who can’t think for ourselves. Of course you hear stories about crazy teens but that happens with adults too. Some things are just too embarrassing to share with everyone, but we understand the risks of social media… hacks and stuff happens. Don’t control our lives, we’re the future and need to make our own decisions– if we mess up, that’s that. As teens, we learn from our mistakes so we become responsible adults.. isn’t this what the world needs? I’m sure that you hid something from your parents when you were younger and even if you think that was a bad choice now, we need to learn that ourselves. Destroying trust could mean much worse consequences in the future.. we won’t trust those who’ve broken our trust before. Trust needs to be earned on both sides. Even now, there’s probably things you don’t share with everyone– that’s what “fake” accounts are to us, I mean, nobody wants their crush to see their worst photos or accidentally follow someone. Thanks for listening.
Agreed! Not all Finstas are bad. I think I make that pretty clear in the post.
I think that going through teens social media accounts is wrong because it breaks their sense of security and trust and think about it would you like someone going through all your accounts and information as long as teens know the risks on the internet and social media e.g. bullying, sextortion and stuff they should be ok but if they don’t they should know to be safe and what to do if you don’t know if your teen is on social media don’t go through their phone the best way to find out by talking to them calmly you don’t want to go right in about their account you need to make them think that it is safe to talk to you first and them feel secure and you will find out a lot more dont ask to many questions just talk to them slowly and you will get to know them way more than you already know talk about you following their account and other stuff but still remember that they can block you and you won’t know and also don’t set restrictions and screen time on their device if you do set this up let them know like I said before be calm and talk to them if you don’t talk to them and you just set restrictions and screen time up if you notice that your teen isn’t using their device as much and feeling depressed and sad it is because you’ve taken their sense of security from them and their one source of entertainment please do not go through teens social accounts and set restrictions and screen time on their device because it takes their sense of security and makes them feel insecure, depressed, mad and upset like I have said multiple times please talk to them and get to know them more instead of going through everything on their device
Hey ” A teenager”. Get over it. Your a kid, regardless of being a teen. Suck it up and understand that the device you hold isnt yours. Its you parents, unless you are working, providing for your own bills. Even so are you living at home? If so, you have no “rights”. Your right is to breath, drink and eat. That it. Kids today are too stuck on thinking everyone owes them things. Nope. You owe your parents for the life and breath they have given you. Your whole idea is understandable bc it comes from a immature mind. A phone isnt a “sense of security”. Its a privilege that you do NOT need to survive. You can talk to a teen or kid until your blue in the face and they will do what they believe is right. What they believe is right is 90% of the time not right. Like my mom and dad use to say in the 80s and 90s when parenting still existed, “get mad, you can get glad in the same pants” . In other words, get over it.
Moving on, Chris great post. The issue is that parents are not more involved and paying attention to their children. I am an IT professional and totally understand how dangerous the internet and social media can be. I am dealing with a step daughter who is 14 and decided to have sex with her “boyfriend”. We believed given “freedom and trust: was the right thing and were very lenient. Being a teenager, she took advantage of our trust and believe she was grown up enough to make her own adult choices. So coming from first hand experience about “giving trust and talking to your kids”. We did that. We gave ample trust, love and affection. Discipline and tough love is absolutely necessary. That is whats missing today. As a child, you do not have rights. You have to EARN those privileges. Our duty as a parent is not to make sure you have social media and communications to your friends. As a teen, you earn that trust and respect.
Teenager the ideas you describe are fantasy. In the real world, this cant happen. Not unless your child is a perfect student, GOD fearing, Parent respecting, Morality bearing teen. These teens are 1 in a million. If they where that trust worthy, then we would need apps like BARK. They would automatically say “wait is this the right thing to do?” “would my parents be disappointed in me and possibly not trust me anymore?” Integrity means doing the right thing even without someone watching you. Thats very very rare. So your advise is fantasy. It is a recipe for disaster.
looking through your child’s dms, spam accounts, etc. is an invasion of privacy. i, as a human being, need privacy – the fact that my parents are the one who pay the bills, provide me food, clothes, etc. has nothing to do with that.
i may not need my phone to survive, but i don’t want to just survive. furthermore, as a parent, your goal shouldn’t be your child’s mere survival, but also their emotional well being and building a relationship based on trust with them. not taking care of this aspect of parenting will create an adult who is lost and broken. i don’t think you want this for your child.
i am not an adult yet. i know i lack experience and maturity. but i need to make my own decisions to grow up. i am well aware of the risks that come with social media and won’t post anything really embarrassing (like most teens, because guess what : we care about our image and our future). i am not going to send nudes, cyber bully anyone, and if i get cyber bullied, i trust my parents enough to talk to them about it. spying on your child will break the trust so they won’t talk to you if there’s an important issue, hide things from you, and won’t be open for dialogue.
you have no right to invade someone’s personal space. yes, talk to them about the risks of social media ; but you should leave your child a space to be themselves and make their own decisions. we are not stupid. we just want to exist.
I partially agree with this article. My mom talked to us at an early age and brought to us the awareness of how bad this world was. She kept persistently showing us videos of this stuff and talking about it, she hardly take away our phones and other electronics, when she did it was behavioral issues. She has the password in case she needs to get in but has a mutual trust with us that there should be no need to search our phones, because she knows we’re smart because we learnt from a young age how horrible people are.
Josh Walters, this is kind of what “Another Teen” is talking about. Some of us do stupid stuff they shouldn’t. However, also as another teen said, there are just as many, if not, more stupid people in your generation. You wouldn’t want us to call all of your generation stupid because of those few, right? Just because your stepdaughter did something stupid doesn’t mean we all did. This of course isn’t 100% her fault either, the sexual predator had to have lured her in. And she would have noticed it if you guys, or at least, her biological dad, had talked to her from a young age about how people can be.
Oh and one more thing. That “you have to thank us for bringing you into this world” stuff is bull crap. We weren’t begging you from the womb/testicles to get down and dirty so we could be alive. YOU forced US into existence, either accidentally or purposefully, and the only way we would owe you anything is if you keep us fed, watered, clothed, and entertained. And we aren’t gonna want to be alive if we’re kept confined in a box.
I 100% agree with you fellow teen. There should be mutual support and trust on both sides. We’re not animals that should be “kept in control”. Dang these control obsessed parents should get over it.
Parents have the rights to do whatever they please, my fellow teenagers, and they may invade your privacy as they feel necessary. You are merely staying that invasion of privacy is unethical and trying to build your argument from that. It is a hilariously futile attempt to chastise these parents with logic that, at it’s core is your crudely assembled philosophy.
Might I remind you are fighting for power that, while definite, will temporarily be held over you. It is amusing how unanimous this “end of the world” mindset is, for you neglect to factor into your logic that your parents’ decisive power over you is chronologically finite. Even more hilarious is how this confirms exactly what these parents think of teenagers: that we are impulsive and lacking in foresight, which in turn causes us to make reckless decisions. In this case, your futile and baseless arguing in an obscure parenting article shows how humorously small-minded you are.
At what point is a child responsible enough to the extent that any limit on their personal lives is ridiculous? Where is the line drawn between common sense and intrusiveness? This seems to be the core question in this sub-conversation that has brewed in the comments of this article.
At a certain point, parents must accept that they have done all that is possible to raise their child not to make self-destructive decisions, and allow this person to suffer the consequences of their mistakes with no intervention. Is this point in time that which is determined by the legal system, 18 years old, the very last day when you can legally make decisions for your child? Is it when your values have no influence on your child’s actions due to independent thinking/stubbornness? It is a lovely fantasy to think that you may influence your child to make good decisions until they have grown into a mature adult that applies your values to their life, but is this the most effective and beneficial way for a person to grow into independence?
I respectfully urge parents to consider the implications of “sheltering” these young adults from the opportunity to make bad decisions, and I respectfully urge teenagers to learn your place and stop bitching at these parents.
i snorted at this lmao. how hard can u try josh? pls this is becoming funny now
yikes, reading some of the parent comments on here, i feel bad for the children mentioned. first of all, you probably don’t have as much control over your kids as you think you do, because not giving your child privacy just results in sneakier kids. second of all, your children are not your prisoners just because you brought them into this world, (which was your decision, not theirs,) and if you treat them like a prisoner, they’re gonna treat you like a prison warden. if you trust your child, they’ll trust you, and they’ll actually tell you about the stuff you’re worried about them doing. third of all, we aren’t automatically dumb because we’re young, and you’re not automatically smart because you’re older. we’ve grown up with the internet, and we’ve grown up having online safety and etiquette taught to us. most of us will self-regulate if given the chance, and most of us are smart enough to spot and avoid creeps. maybe don’t let your 11 year old have instagram, because younger kids are more gullible, but your 16 year old probably does know what to watch out for. the block and report buttons exist, and a lot of us will just block and/or report someone and move on.
tl;dr: strict parenting creates sneaky kids, your kids aren’t your prisoners, and kids these days know about online safety because we grew up hearing about it.
also highly doubt “also a teenager” is an actual teenager, i’ve literally never met anyone, online or offline, from the ages of 13-19 who speaks like that, even unironically. like???? even when we’re arguing a point, nobody talks like they’re a preppy white boy trying to sound smart by using big words in their essay. if anything, there’s gonna be a meme or two thrown in there, a bunch of internet grammar, etc. and probably not care about whether a random internet boomer can read it with all the textspeak, abbreviation, and memey stuff that’s added in habitually. idk it’s just hilarious to me that the argument for invading your child’s privacy is so weak that’s someone, probably josh tbh, had to comment from the perspective of a teenager who would openly embrace their parents blatantly violating their right to privacy. good try though lmao
If I ever get a finsta, it will literally me being like I usually am. Making stupid faces, dog photos, memes, just random stuff. Not risky partying or whatever. I mean, my “regular Insta” will be probably used less.