Meta announced Monday that it is expanding artificial intelligence technology globally to identify teenagers who misrepresent their age on its platforms, placing them in age-appropriate protections even when they use adult birthdates to create accounts.
The social media giant said it uses AI to detect users it suspects are teenagers despite false age information and automatically enrolls them in Teen Account protections across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. "We use AI technology to find people we suspect to be teens, even if they use an adult birthday, and place them in Teen Account protections," Meta said in a statement Monday.
The expansion follows Meta's $18 billion in legal settlements and mounting criticism that its platforms fail to adequately protect minors from online harms. The company characterized age misrepresentation as an "industry-wide challenge," noting that some teenagers deliberately provide false birthdates to access experiences restricted to older users.
Teen Account features automatically limit who can contact teenagers, restrict the content they see, and control time spent on the apps. Meta said ensuring all teens receive these protections depends on accurately knowing their age.
The company stated that since first introducing the age-estimation technology, it has been placing increasing numbers of teens in age-appropriate protections. The global rollout began this month and represents a significant expansion of the automated system.
Meta indicated it is also working to extend similar age-detection technology to Facebook and plans to deploy comparable systems on Threads later this year. The announcement comes as landmark cases examining social media's impact on children began in the United States this week, and as regulatory scrutiny of tech platforms' child safety practices intensifies globally.
The AI-based approach aims to address a persistent challenge in online safety: verifying user age when individuals can easily provide false information during account creation. By automating age detection, Meta seeks to ensure younger users receive appropriate content restrictions and privacy protections regardless of the birthdates they initially provided.