Meta Rolls Out AI Age Checks to Teens Worldwide

Meta has rolled out worldwide an artificial intelligence system that estimates whether users are teenagers, aiming to catch young people who signed up with an adult's birth date. The company announced the global expansion on Monday, 9 November.

The system is designed to find teenagers who gave a false birth date and then either move their accounts into a restricted Teen Account or remove them from the platform. Meta said it had begun using the system on Instagram around the world. It is also rolling out the tool on Facebook, where flagged accounts are moved into Teen Accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. Al Jazeera reported that before Monday the system had already been in place in more than 20 countries.

To judge whether a holder is likely a teenager, the AI searches the account for context clues, such as birthday celebrations or mentions of school grades. Meta says the system uses visual cues in pictures and videos but does not use facial recognition, the technology that matches faces to identities.

Teen Accounts are Meta's existing settings for younger users. They keep accounts private by default, limit the types of content teenagers see, and prevent strangers from sending them direct messages. Parents can supervise them. Meta said millions more young people worldwide would be placed in Teen Accounts once the new technology is in place.

Rules differ by country. In places that ban social media for users under a certain age, Meta may shut down a flagged account entirely. In the United States, Meta will cap under-18s' time on its apps at two hours a day and apply a curfew from midnight to 6am. In Australia, Meta says it has started using a feature from Apple that verifies a user's age range when a phone is set up and passes that information to downloaded apps.

Meta also said it plans a similar age-detection system worldwide for Threads, its text-based app, before the end of the year. The company said it supports legislation that would require app stores, the digital marketplaces where phone apps are downloaded, to verify users' ages.

Whether the new step will protect children from online harm is in doubt, according to Al Jazeera, which reports that experts have expressed such doubts.