Meta has shared more details about how it plans to use AI to catch teens lying about their age on Instagram. As Bloomberg first reported, early next year, the company will deploy the “Adult Classifier,” a tool it says will identify users under the age of 18 and automatically apply Instagram’s more restrictive privacy settings to them.
According to Alison Hartnett, Meta’s director of product management for youth and social impact, the software will look at indicators such as the accounts a user follows and what content they regularly interact with. If the tool suspects someone is under 18, it will direct them to a teen account, regardless of how old they claim on their profile.
Meta did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment.
Meta previously said it would use AI to identify young users lying about their age before rolling out teen accounts in September. With those accounts, the company automatically enforces Instagram’s strictest privacy settings on children under 16.
For example, the accounts are automatically set to private, and they can’t send messages to strangers. Facing pressure from lawmakers and parents, Meta had already imposed a number of restrictions on underage users before the rollout of teen accounts, but with the official launch of the feature, the company made it so teens can’t change those settings without parental permission.
On Monday, the company did not disclose how accurate the adult classification tool is in determining a person’s age. Meta told Bloomberg that it will eventually give people who have been misidentified by the software the ability to appeal, though the social media giant is still working on what that process will look like.
The company will prompt teens who try to manually change the age listed on their account to prove their identity. Users will have the option to either upload an official government-issued ID or share a video selfie on Yoti. Meta previously partnered with Yoti to bring age verification to Facebook Dating. The company’s machine learning algorithm estimates a person’s age based on their facial features. Once Yoti shares its estimate with Meta, they both delete the video.
The Adult Classifier software is part of a broader effort by Meta to make it more difficult for people to lie about their age on Instagram. Separately, the company plans to flag teens who try to create a new account using an email address already associated with an existing account and a different birthday. It also plans to use device IDs to figure out who is creating a new profile.
Meta, along with Google and TikTok owner ByteDance, recently failed to persuade a US federal judge to dismiss a series of lawsuits that alleged the companies failed to adequately protect their young users from the harmful and addictive effects of social media use.