Meta is expanding its use of artificial intelligence to identify teenagers who give false information about their age when creating accounts on Instagram, in a move aimed at strengthening the protections for younger users.
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Creating a social media account with a fake date of birth is not new. Teenagers have been doing it for years to get around age restrictions or access features they are not normally allowed to use.
Meta recognises the scale of the problem, which is why it has decided to expand its efforts to detect accounts that provide inaccurate age information.
The company has announced that it is extending its AI-powered age detection technology on Instagram to users around the world.
The technology aims to identify accounts likely to belong to teenagers, even when their owners have entered birth dates suggesting they are adults, and then automatically apply the protections designed for those accounts.
According to Meta, this expansion could help provide protection to millions of additional teenagers around the world.
Instagram will not rely on date of birth alone
Instagram already offers "Teen Accounts", which place limits on who can contact younger users, what content they can see, and how much time they spend on the platform. Facebook and Messenger offer similar protections, but the core problem is that these measures depend on users being honest when they enter their age.
For example, a teenager who sets up a new account and claims to be 20 can get around the restrictions meant for users under 18.
This is where Meta's AI technology comes in. The company will no longer rely entirely on the date of birth a user enters at sign-up.
Instead, it will use AI to identify accounts suspected of belonging to teenagers, and move them automatically into the experience suited to their age, with additional protections.
Meta had already used this approach, but its latest announcement indicates that it is extending it to Instagram worldwide.
The company has also started rolling out the technology on Facebook, while Threads is expected to gain similar age-detection capabilities worldwide later this year.
Meta is also working to improve its ability to identify accounts belonging to children under 13, the age group not permitted to use its platforms.
Meta calls on Apple and other platforms to help
Meta does not believe responsibility for verifying users' ages should fall entirely on individual apps. It believes app stores and the companies that develop operating systems can play a bigger role in this process.
In Australia, the company has begun using a feature offered by Apple that lets parents share their child's age range with app developers. When parents set up an iPhone for their children, they can allow Apple to share the child's age range with app developers.
This mechanism gives apps such as Instagram an additional way to check that users meet age requirements, without needing to share their exact date of birth.
Meta wants to expand the use of this kind of system more widely.
The company believes that having app stores take responsibility for verifying users' ages, and then sharing that information with different apps, could provide more consistent protections while reducing the need for separate identity checks.
The announcement also follows an agreement Meta reached with 52 attorneys general from both the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, aimed at strengthening protections for younger users.
The company is encouraging its rivals, including TikTok and YouTube, to take similar steps to improve age verification and protect teenagers.
For parents, the most notable change is that Instagram will no longer rely to the same extent on the age that their children state when creating their accounts.
However, the success of this step will depend not only on how widely the technology is adopted around the world, but also on how accurately the AI can identify accounts that really belong to teenagers, and how well it can tell them apart from those of adult users.
