Meta is expanding AI age detection globally on Instagram today to identify suspected teenagers who registered with adult birthdays and apply Teen Account protections. The company says millions more teenagers will receive automatic restrictions covering contact from other people, content and time spent using the app.
The technology identifies accounts Meta suspects belong to teenagers even when their supplied birth dates indicate adulthood. Meta says its Facebook rollout is continuing, while a similar system is scheduled to begin launching worldwide on Threads later this year.
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Meta says the expansion builds on an agreement with 52 bipartisan attorneys general covering US states, territories and the District of Columbia. Under that agreement, the company says it is improving detection of accounts potentially belonging to children younger than 13, alongside its systems for identifying teenagers aged 13 through 17. It is also urging TikTok and YouTube to adopt comparable practices.
In Australia, Meta has started using an age-range signal supplied by Apple as an additional way to assess users’ ages. Parents setting up a teen’s smartphone can choose to let the app store confirm the user’s age and assign a range, which Apple then sends to developers when the teen downloads an app. Meta’s participation is voluntary, and the company says optional participation by app stores and developers produces uneven protections between apps.
Meta supports legislation that would require app stores to verify ages and obtain parents’ consent. The company argues that sharing a verified device signal across apps would better protect privacy than having platforms conduct separate checks. It says developers’ age estimates could also help identify errors and send corrections back to app stores.
Parents in the United States are due to start seeing an Instagram feed video this month explaining Meta’s age-protection efforts. It will direct them to an article by Larry Magid, internet safety advocate and President and CEO of ConnectSafely, covering age checks and how parents can encourage accurate birthdays; parents worldwide can read it.
In February, Instagram outlined plans to alert parents when supervised teens repeatedly searched for suicide or self-harm material, initially targeting four countries including Australia and the United States. That feature required both accounts to have supervision enabled through Family Center and withheld the specific terms the teenager searched.
