Instagram to use AI to detect teenagers hiding age

Meta is expanding its artificial intelligence-powered age detection system worldwide to identify teenagers who misrepresent their age on Instagram and automatically apply stricter safety settings to their accounts.

Announced on Monday, November 9, the move will allow Instagram to flag accounts it suspects belong to users under 18, even when their registered date of birth indicates they are adults.

Those accounts can then be placed in Instagram’s Teen Accounts, which have built-in restrictions on who can contact young users, the content they can view and the time they spend on the platform.

Age verification remains a challenge for social media companies, as younger users can enter false birth dates to gain access to features intended for adults. Meta’s AI technology is designed to detect such accounts instead of relying solely on the information provided during registration.

The company said the system had already helped bring more teenagers under age-appropriate safeguards, leading it to extend the technology to more users globally.

The protections available through Teen Accounts include limits on who can contact teenagers, restrictions on potentially inappropriate content and tools to help manage their time on the platform. These settings are applied automatically, without requiring users or their parents to activate each feature separately.

Meta is also extending the age-detection technology to Facebook. It plans to begin a global rollout of similar safeguards on Threads later this year.

The expansion is part of the company's wider effort to prevent teenagers from bypassing age restrictions across its social media platforms and ensure younger users receive additional protections even if they provide incorrect birth dates.