Instagram eyes AI use to catch teens lying about age

Parent company Meta has software to sift through user's profile and predict their age

Meta Platforms, under fire from parents and lawmakers over its impact on teens' mental health, plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify young users on Instagram who are lying about their age and automatically switch them into more restrictive privacy settings.

With a proprietary software tool it calls an "adult classifier", Meta will categorize users into two age brackets - older or younger than 18 - based on the person's own account data, according to Ms Allison Hartnett, Meta's director of product management for youth and social impact.

The software can sift through a user's profile, see their follower list and what content they interact with, and will even scan unsuspecting "happy birthday" posts made by friends to predict a user's age.

Based on the software's findings, people who are suspected to be under 18 will be automatically placed into teen accounts regardless of how old they claim to be on their profile, Ms Hartnett said, sharing more details on the process for the first time.

In September, Instagram introduced these new teen accounts, which come with more stringent default privacy settings, like limiting who a user can receive messages from and what types of content they can look at. The company did not disclose how accurate the adult classifier is.

The company is already moving teens into these more restrictive settings based on their self-reported birthday, but plans to utilize the adult classifier early in 2025 to help catch people who may be trying to skirt the new rules.