Instagram will introduce this news globally. The objective is to identify the accounts of minors under 17 years of age to independently apply the protections provided for teenagers.
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On Instagram, declaring yourself an adult is very simple: just enter a date of birth sufficiently distant in time. The problem, of course, is that no one guarantees that date is true. Meta therefore decided to rely on artificial intelligence to understand how old one of its users might be, even when the birthday indicated on the profile tells a completely different story. After testing the system in the United States, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom and subsequently extending it to the European Union, the company has now announced its global adoption on one of its most successful platforms. The objective is to identify, above all, accounts that appear to belong to children between 13 and 17 years old despite declaring themselves to be adults, so as to automatically apply the protections provided for teenagers.
Digital clues
But how can an algorithm understand someone’s age without asking them to insert a photo of a document? In reality it does not use a single clue, but rather tries to reconstruct an overall picture by analyzing what appears in the profile: posts, comments, captions and biography may contain references to birthdays, school or class attended, while photographs and videos provide further visual signals. In the latter case, however, Meta specifies that it is not facial recognition, since the system does not create a sort of biometric fingerprint to identify a person, but looks for general characteristics that can suggest an approximate age, such as height or body structure.
All these signals are combined with other information about account activity to produce a probabilistic estimate. In short, no single selfie would be transformed into a digital identity card, but it would be combined with numerous other clues collected to trigger the possible suspicion that behind an account for adults there is, in reality, a teenager.
A protected profile
If the AI believes that a user is between 13 and 17 years old, Instagram can automatically include them in the so-called Teen Accounts even when an adult age appears on the profile. In these accounts the profile is set up with more rigid protections: private messages are limited to people already followed or known, sensitive content and offensive comments are filtered more, there are notifications inviting you to leave the app after 60 minutes and a night mode that silences alerts between 10pm and 7am.
Furthermore, for children under 16, many of these restrictions cannot be lifted without a parent’s permission. The case of children under 13, the minimum age generally required to use Instagram, is different: when Meta believes that an account belongs to a child, it can deactivate it and ask for age verification before allowing it to be restored.
Privacy and errors
And it is from this case that the most delicate part derives. To protect minors, Instagram needs to look more closely at what users post to try to figure out how old they really are. However, the possibility of making mistakes remains inevitable. An adult with a youthful appearance or with school-related content could be misclassified, just as a teenager could manage to escape scrutiny.
In cases where Instagram suspects that someone is changing their date of birth to avoid the restrictions, it can request verification via document or through external age estimation systems from video selfies. This technology will also continue to be rolled out across Facebook and, subsequently, Threads.
