Meta started testing AI-powered age detection for Instagram way back in 2022. It’s been through a few refinements since then, and now it’s ready to go global, according to the company.
The first affected users, of course, were Americans. Later this month, AI-based age verification will “place millions more teens in Teen Account protections” on the platform. The company’s explainer will be shown in video format to American adults (and presumably teens), detailing how the process works and what the new mandatory teen accounts entail.
Appropriate Instagram
The company launched Teen Accounts, which place restrictions on younger users, in several countries and regions earlier this year. Now, it’s time for the rest of the planet to get their faces scanned by AI. Age detection disregards date-of-birth inputs and uses images to estimate the user’s actual age. Meta also uses Apple’s age-range signal for (some of) its Australian users. Australia, currently being very prickly about social media for younger users, may look more favourably on Meta because of this. Or maybe not. Prickly, remember?
What hasn’t been explained is the pace of the rollout. Instead, Meta used its announcement post to outline how it is definitely, honestly, very concerned about what happens to its teenage users. To be entirely fair, the platform has been taking steps like these for some time… but only after it was yelled at by enough external sources.
Following the Instagram AI age detection rollout, Meta also intends to do the same for its Threads platform. That should happen before the end of this year.
