Meta expands Instagram’s AI age-guessing tech globally

Meta announced on Monday that it’s expanding its AI-powered age estimation technology on Instagram worldwide to identify more teens and place them under its Teen Account protections, as it faces numerous lawsuits accusing its platforms of harming teens.

The social media giant says it will use the AI technology to find people it suspects to be teens, even if they use an adult birthday.

Teen Accounts place users into a stricter account experience with additional safeguards, such as receiving direct messages only from people they follow or are already connected to, hiding harmful comments, and setting accounts to private by default.

Meta’s age-guessing tools use AI to analyze entire profiles for contextual clues, such as birthday celebrations or mentions of school grades. Meta also looks for these signals across different formats, such as posts, comments, bios, captions, and more. The company also looks at visual cues from photos and videos, including a person’s height or bone structure.

Meta said it’s continuing to roll out the technology on Facebook, with a similar global rollout planned for Threads later this year.

The global expansion comes as Meta reached settlements worth up to $18 billion with nearly every U.S. state and territory in August to resolve lawsuits alleging its platforms harm teens. As part of the settlements, Meta agreed to improve how it identifies teens and children under 13.

“We’ll continue to do our part to proactively ensure teens are in age-appropriate experiences on our apps,” Meta wrote in a blog post. “That’s why as part of our agreement with 52 bipartisan attorneys general across US states, territories, and the District of Columbia, we’re investing in even stronger technology to proactively catch accounts that may belong to children under 13. We’re also strengthening the technology we use to identify accounts that may belong to teens between the ages of 13 and 17 so we can ensure those accounts are placed in experiences designed for teens, even if they give us an adult birthday.”

Meta said parents in the U.S. will start seeing an in-feed video on Instagram explaining its approach to ensuring their teens are in age-appropriate protections.