Instagram Enhances AI-Powered Age Verification
Instagram is expanding its AI-powered age verification process to ensure more teenagers utilize its safety features. The platform is also introducing new parental notifications to raise awareness of online risks. These updates are crucial given the increasing discussions around social media age limits.
Advanced AI Age Detection
Over the past few years, Instagram has been improving its age-checking systems. These new processes can detect signals indicating a user might have misrepresented their age. The improved AI systems now consider more factors to assess a user's age more accurately.
How Meta's AI Determines User Age
Meta explains its AI age-checking process as follows:
To develop our adult classifier, we first train an AI model on signals such as profile information, like when a person’s account was created and interactions with other profiles and content. For example, people in the same age group tend to interact similarly with certain types of content. From those signals, the model learns to make calculations about whether someone is an adult or a teen.
The system analyzes engagement trends, including likes, shares, direct messages, watch time, and followed profiles, to identify potential discrepancies in age. Meta also incorporates location-specific data to account for local trends.
This pattern recognition approach leverages billions of parameters to identify how users interact and determine their age. This method could be effective in catching teenagers misrepresenting their age.
If Meta fails to address this issue effectively, more teenagers might be forced off its platforms or the company could face fines.
Increased Scrutiny and Potential Age Restrictions
Several countries, including Australia, Denmark, the U.S., and the U.K., are considering stricter age restrictions for social media access. This adds urgency to Meta's efforts, as non-compliance could lead to penalties.
Instagram is also testing age verification via video selfies in partnership with Yoti in some regions.
While Instagram is exploring various methods, Meta believes age verification should ideally occur at the app store level.
Understanding the age of people online is an industry-wide challenge. We’ll continue our efforts to help ensure teens are placed in age-appropriate online experiences, like Teen Accounts, but the most effective way to understand age is by obtaining parental approval and verifying age on the app store.
Meta has been advocating for this approach and may be gaining support from U.S. regulators.
New Parental Notifications for Teen Safety
Instagram is also rolling out new alerts for parents about teen safety features and resources for discussing online safety with their children.
This initiative aims to encourage regular communication between parents and teens about online safety.
Teen Accounts: A Positive Step
Instagram's teen account feature, launched last year, has seen significant adoption. The company reports:
We’ve enrolled at least 54 million teens into Teen Accounts globally so far, with 97% of teens ages 13-15 electing to remain in these protections, and we recently expanded the Teen Account experience to Facebook and Messenger. Parents and teens alike are telling us that they are happy with this new, reimagined experience.
Despite positive feedback, Instagram continues to address parental concerns about online safety for teens.
With potential restrictions and fines looming, Meta is prioritizing these efforts. These new measures should further enhance its safety systems.
Learn more about Meta's latest teen safety features here.
