Pinterest is the platform most associated with teen-girl harm in the UK. In 2022 a coroner ruled that content from Pinterest contributed to the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing thousands of pins about depression, self-harm, and suicide. The senior coroner for north London described the material as not safe for a child to see. Pinterest’s own head of community operations agreed under oath that the platform was not safe at the time.
Today the Wired Parents Platform Safety Scorecard adds Pinterest to its ratings of 21 apps. Pinterest averages 2.5, which puts it in the high-risk band, tied with Facebook, between Snapchat and Discord. It is not the worst platform on the scorecard. It is not even close to the worst. The platforms with the lowest scores are Kick at 1.2, Reddit and X at 1.5, and Twitch at 1.8.
The platform with the most consequential UK child-safety case attached to its name is in the middle of the scorecard, not at the bottom. The reason is that after Molly Russell’s inquest, Pinterest did substantial work that most other platforms still have not done.
What changed at Pinterest after 2017
The Molly Russell inquest lasted two weeks in autumn 2022. Pinterest and Meta were both ordered to give evidence. Judson Hoffman, Pinterest’s head of community operations, told the court the platform was not safe when Molly used it. Coroner Andrew Walker concluded that the negative effects of online content contributed to her death “in a more than minimal way.”
Pinterest was named in the coroner’s Prevention of Future Deaths report, along with Meta, Snapchat, and Twitter. Each platform had until 8 December 2022 to set out what action they would take.
In the years since, Pinterest has done more than the others. A short list of the structural changes the platform has made:
Under-16 accounts are private by default. The under-16 profile begins as a temporary three-day link until the teen has earned five followers. Messaging is restricted to mutual followers only. Comments are off by default for everyone under 18.
Direct messaging was paused entirely after the Molly Russell case and reintroduced cautiously, with consent requirements. A parental passcode was added in 2024, allowing parents to lock changes to their teen’s settings for messaging, privacy, and account management.
Weight-loss adverts were banned in 2021, the first major platform to do so. Body-type filters were added to women’s fashion and beauty searches, returning results that include a variety of body shapes, including disabled bodies. The same was not added to men’s fashion. Unlike Instagram and TikTok, Pinterest does not allow beauty filters at all.
The Molly Rose Foundation, set up by Molly Russell’s family to push for child online safety, analysed Digital Services Act transparency data from six major platforms (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and X) in early 2025. Their conclusion was that most major platforms were “substantially failing to respond to the risk profile of their products.” Pinterest was the one platform they singled out as “notably” investing in proactive identification and removal of suicide and self-harm content.
That endorsement from that foundation is the strongest possible signal of how the platform has changed. It does not absolve Pinterest of what happened in 2017. But it tells parents something important: the platform Molly Russell used and the platform a 14-year-old would use today are not the same product.
What still isn’t fixed
The algorithm is the same algorithm. Pinterest is fundamentally a more-like-this engine. A teen who searches for “fitness inspiration” or “diet” is one or two clicks from disordered-eating content. A teen who searches “self-care” or “depression” can find pins that romanticise low mood and self-harm. Pinterest’s own most recent EU transparency report acknowledged removing 1.1 million pins for self-injury content in a single four-month period. That is evidence both that enforcement is happening and that there is a lot to enforce.
Pinterest’s content risk on the Wired Parents Scorecard is rated 2 out of 4, which is high risk. The platform’s structural design has not changed. The default user experience is to keep showing more of whatever the user has shown interest in, and the platform’s algorithm cannot easily distinguish between a teen who loves art deco design and a teen whose interest in art deco design is bound up with deeper distress.
For most children using Pinterest, the platform is what it appears to be: a tool for finding outfit inspiration, planning birthday parties, gathering recipes, building mood boards. For a small but real group of vulnerable children, particularly teen girls already experiencing mental health difficulties, the same algorithm becomes something else. The Wired Parents rating reflects both realities.
The data practices are also standard-aggressive. Pinterest shares user information with third parties for their own purposes. Users’ activity on Pinterest is used to target advertising on other sites. Pinterest uses user data to train AI models. Teens in the UK and EU are opted out of personalised advertising by default. Teens elsewhere are not. The privacy category scores 2 out of 4. Better than Meta or TikTok. Not meaningfully restrained.
Pinterest has no Family Center equivalent. The 2024 parental passcode locks settings, but it is not a supervision tool. There is no way for a parent to link to a teen’s Pinterest account, see what they are pinning, see who they are following, or get alerts. Parental controls score 3, which is better than the platforms that have nothing at all (Reddit, Twitch, Kick, X) but well behind Instagram’s 4.
What this means for the scorecard
The Wired Parents recommended age for Pinterest is 16+. That comes from the methodology, which maps the platform’s six-category average to an age band. An average of 2.5 sits in the 16+ band.
This will be higher than many parents expect, especially parents who think of Pinterest as a benign craft and inspiration platform. The case for 16+ is straightforward: the algorithm-driven content risk for vulnerable teens is real, and the platform offers no parent-side supervision. A 13-year-old can sign up to Pinterest with no parental knowledge, search for anything they want, and a parent has no tools to see what they are doing.
The case for a younger recommended age is also fair: Pinterest’s default safety settings for under-16s are genuinely good, the platform’s improvements since 2017 are substantial, and the bullying environment is materially lower-risk than Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat. The platform’s own minimum age is 13, and Common Sense Media rates it 13+.
Our recommended age is 16+ rather than 13+ because the content-risk concern for vulnerable teen girls specifically is severe even if the platform-average risk is moderate. We would rather flag the risk and have parents decide, than under-rate the platform and have parents not flag the conversation at all.
How Pinterest compares to other platforms
In the scorecard’s middle band of social platforms, Pinterest sits alongside Facebook, Discord, and Instagram. All four are platforms where the answer to “should my teen be on this?” depends heavily on engagement: which features are turned on, which controls the parent has set up, what conversations have happened at home.
The platforms with much worse scores than Pinterest are the ones where engagement does not help much. Reddit has no parental controls at all and the UK regulator fined the company £14.47m in February 2026 for unlawfully processing children’s data. Kick is owned by the same parent company as the crypto-gambling site Stake.com and publishes no transparency reports. X has dismantled its trust and safety operation. Twitch has no built-in parental controls and a long history of grooming cases.
Pinterest is not in that company. It has done the work, and the work shows up in the ratings. The question of whether your teen should use it is still a question worth asking, but it is a different question from whether your teen should use Kick or Reddit.
What to do as a parent
Three concrete steps if your child uses Pinterest, in order of priority.
Set up the parental passcode. This is the single most useful action available. With a passcode in place, your teen cannot change their messaging settings, account privacy, or content preferences without it. The passcode is set within your teen’s account, not yours, so you will need to do it with them. Pinterest’s help center explains the process. Without the passcode, every default setting can be reversed by the teen at any time.
Have a specific conversation about the algorithm. Not a general internet safety conversation. A specific one about how Pinterest’s algorithm works. Tell them that the platform shows more of whatever they engage with, and that engagement includes scrolling past slowly, lingering on an image, or saving a pin. Tell them that if their feed starts to make them feel worse rather than better, the algorithm has not noticed. They have to notice. The action is to actively engage with different content (food, animals, hobbies, anything neutral) or to use the option to hide pins they don’t want to see.
Pay attention to their boards, not their pins. A teenager’s secret board on Pinterest is the digital equivalent of a notebook they keep in a drawer. You don’t need to read every pin. But if your teen has stopped showing you what they’re working on, and previously did, that is worth a conversation. Coroner Andrew Walker’s report after the Molly Russell inquest specifically called for parents to have access to material their children view, with appropriate retention. Pinterest does not offer that access. The conversation has to do the work that the platform doesn’t.
Why this rating matters
Wired Parents rates platforms on the evidence available, not on the reputation a platform carries. Pinterest’s reputation is largely defined by 2017. The platform’s reality in 2026 is different. Both can be true.
The reason for adding Pinterest to the scorecard now is precisely because the gap between reputation and current reality is unusually wide. Parents who avoid Pinterest because of what they have heard about it may be missing a useful platform their teen would benefit from. Parents who let their teen use Pinterest because they have heard nothing recent about it may be missing real risks the platform still carries.
The scorecard is meant to do the work of separating those two things. Pinterest’s score is 2.5, average among social platforms, and the work the platform has done since 2017 is real. The work the platform still has to do is also real. Both numbers belong on the card.
See Pinterest on the Wired Parents Platform Safety Scorecard →
Sources
Wired Parents Platform Safety Scorecard
Molly Russell inquest verdict, BBC News, 30 September 2022
Molly Russell coroner’s Prevention of Future Deaths report, October 2022
Pinterest DSA Transparency Report (most recent)
