Teenagers who sign up for Instagram with a fake adult birthday are about to find it harder to stay hidden. Meta is rolling out its AI age-estimation system worldwide, moving suspected 13- to 17-year-olds into its stricter Teen Accounts whatever birth date they typed in.
Meta announced the expansion on 9 November in a post on its newsroom, saying it will place “millions more teens” into Teen Account protections. It did not give a figure. The technology first launched in the US, the EU and Brazil last year, The Verge reports. Meta is still rolling it out on Facebook and plans a similar global launch on Threads later this year.
How the age guessing works
The system does not ask for ID. According to TechCrunch, it scans whole profiles for clues such as birthday posts or mentions of a school year, across posts, comments, bios and captions. It also looks at visual cues in photos and videos, including a person’s height or bone structure.
Teen Accounts are private by default, only allow messages from people a teen already follows or is connected to, hide harmful comments, and limit time on the app. Younger teens cannot loosen those settings without a parent’s permission, The Verge notes.
In the US, parents will start seeing an in-feed Instagram video this month explaining the process and how to correct a teen’s age. In Australia, Meta has also begun using Apple’s age-range signal, which lets a parent confirm a child’s age range on the phone itself and pass it to apps at download.
The legal pressure behind it
The move follows settlements worth up to $18 billion that Meta struck in August with nearly every US state and territory over claims its apps harm teens, TechCrunch notes. Under its agreement with 52 attorneys general, Meta committed to better ways of spotting teens and children under 13. Meta says finding under-13s is a separate process from this rollout.
Meta used its post to push for age checks at the app-store level and called on TikTok and YouTube to adopt the same practices. Lawmakers are moving too. New York has already passed a law that makes chatbots check ages before acting like a friend, and surveys suggest most teens now turn to AI when they feel low.
Why it matters: Age checks are shifting from a box users fill in to a judgement an AI makes about them. That should catch more teens who lie, but it also means a model is reading people’s photos and posts to decide how old they look, and adults it misjudges will need a way to appeal.
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