Instagram Uses AI to Identify Underage Users, Enforce Teen Protections
Meta has announced that it is now using artificial intelligence to detect teens who misrepresent their age on Instagram, with the goal of automatically placing them in restricted Teen Accounts. The move aims to ensure that young users benefit from enhanced safety measures, even if they initially bypassed them by registering with a false birthdate, without using a guilty-until-proven-innocent system that would require all new accounts to verify their identity.
Teen Accounts were introduced last year as a way to provide a safer experience for users under 18, limiting who can contact them and the types of content they can access. Teens under 16 require parental approval to adjust any of these settings. While Instagram has long used AI to estimate user age, this marks a more assertive application of the technology – actively identifying suspected teen accounts and applying protections accordingly.
The platform explained that it looks at behavioural signals, including birthday messages and user reports, to determine whether someone may be underage despite listing an adult date of birth. If AI flags an account, it is enrolled in Teen Account mode by default. It’s not clear how false positives will be dealt with yet, but users will presumably have the option of verifying their identity if they are incorrectly flagged.
“The digital world continues to evolve and we have to evolve with it,” Meta wrote in a blog post, emphasizing the importance of collaborating with parents to ensure safety online. The company is also rolling out notifications to parents, offering guidance on verifying their teen’s listed age and discussing the significance of honesty online.
This update follows Meta’s recent expansion of Teen Accounts to Facebook and Messenger. So far, Instagram has placed at least 54 million users into Teen Accounts, with the company reporting that 97% of teens aged 13–15 have remained within these protected environments – and this number may only continue to creep higher as the AI inevitably gets better at detecting and flagging accounts from suspected underage users.
