Too young to use Instagram? Meta’s AI Classifier could help catch teens lying about their age

Meta revealed that it is working on a new AI powered tool that will help determine if a person signing up for Instagram is a teen or an adult.

Meta's new AI powered age detection is called 'adult classifier'. (Image Source: Meta)

Meta, the parent company of Instagram is being scrutinized by several government agencies around the world, accusing the platform of posing risks to the physical and mental of children from excessive use. While some countries already have some measures in place that prevent underage users from creating an account on social media platforms, the Australian government recently went as far as proposing a ban on social media for children under the age of 16.

In a blog post, Meta announced that it is working on a new AI-powered tool that could help catch teens who are lying about their age. While Meta-owned platforms like Instagram and Facebook require users to enter their age when signing up, many users lie about their age.

Meta says the AI model, dubbed Adult Classifier can “help determine whether someone is an adult (18 or over) or a teen (13-17)” and will automatically apply the appropriate privacy settings.

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To detect if a person is a teen or an adult, the AI model has been trained on signals like profile information like when a person’s account was created and analyses their content and interaction with other people. If the AI suspects that the user is under 18, it will mark their account and make it a teen account irrespective of their claimed age.

If ‘adult classifier’ detects that an account is being used by a teen, Instagram will set their account private and prevent them from messaging strangers. While Meta already had some measures in place that applied certain restrictions to teen accounts, with the new feature, the company altered its policy so that teens cannot change these settings without approval from their parents.

However, the accuracy of the new AI-powered ‘adult classifier’ tool still remains unknown, but in a statement to Bloomberg, Meta said that accounts that have been falsely identified by the software will be able to appeal to undo these restrictions by sharing their official government IDs or uploading a selfie.