Meta Expands Instagram's AI Age Detection Worldwide to Catch Teens Posing as Adults

The system flags accounts that Meta suspects belong to users under 18 even when they signed up with an adult date of birth, and applies Teen Account settings to them automatically. Those settings limit who can contact a teenager, what content they see and how much time they spend in the app. Meta said in a blog post that the technology had placed more teens into age-appropriate protections since it was first introduced and that the results were encouraging. It did not publish accuracy figures or say how many accounts have been reclassified so far.

The global rollout matters because age checks have become the main compliance question for social media companies, as governments and US state prosecutors press them to keep minors out of adult experiences. As the system spreads, Meta's own estimate of a user's age will decide which version of Instagram a teenager sees more often than the birthday they typed in. For parents in the UAE and the rest of the Gulf, the change means teenagers who registered as adults could find the restrictions switched on without anyone opting in, Gulf News noted.

Meta said it is also rolling the technology out on Facebook, and plans to launch similar technology globally on Threads later this year.

The company is also trying to put more of the burden on Apple and Google. In Australia, Meta has started using Apple's age-range signal as an extra way to judge a user's age. Under that system a parent sets up a teen's phone so the app store confirms the user's age band, and Apple passes the range to developers whenever the teen downloads an app. Meta said take-up of the signal is voluntary for both app stores and developers, which it argued leads to uneven protection from one app to the next. The company said a single verified signal from the device, shared with all apps, is more effective and better for privacy than each platform running its own checks. It backs laws that would require app stores to verify age and get parental consent, with developers' own age estimates as a backstop.

Meta also called on TikTok and YouTube to adopt the same practices.

The announcement ties the expansion to commitments Meta has made to regulators in the United States. Under an agreement with 52 bipartisan attorneys general from US states, territories and the District of Columbia, Meta said it is investing in technology to proactively find accounts that may belong to children under 13, the minimum age for its apps, and is strengthening its ability to identify users aged 13 to 17.

Meta is also running a campaign aimed at parents. This month, parents in the United States will start seeing an in-feed video on Instagram that explains how the company places teens into age-appropriate protections and how families can make sure a teen's age is recorded correctly. The video links to an article by Larry Magid, chief executive of the online safety group ConnectSafely, describing Meta's layered approach to age assurance, which Meta said is available to parents worldwide.

The next step is Threads, where Meta has said only that a comparable global system will arrive later this year.