• by Colin Kirkland , November 5, 2024

In response to the ongoing concern over the negative mental health effects of Meta’s family of apps on teens, the tech giant is developing a new AI-powered system designed to detect whether teen users are lying about their age when creating an account on Instagram and subsequently enforce the proper privacy settings.

According to a new report by Bloomberg, Meta is using a proprietary software tool called an “adult classifier” that is able to detect whether users are older or younger than 18 by processing their personal account data.

“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,” the report reads.

With the U.S. Surgeon General and lawmakers making a case for warning labels on major social-media apps because of their possible harm to users' mental health -- potentially doubling the risk and anxiety and depression symptoms in younger users -- and mounting legal pressure regarding the tech giant's alleged failure to protect teens, Meta is now rolling out more tools aimed at fixing the widespread issue of intimate image abuse, predatory behavior, sextortion, and more.

Instagram began checking users’ ages in 2019 to prevent those under 13 years of age from creating accounts. It then began asking users to provide their birthdays, and subsequently suspended the launch of Instagram Kids, a version of the app it was building for children under 13.

In 2022, Meta launched age verification on Instagram, which requires younger users to provide a government ID, or get friends or parents to confirm their age. However, upon testing the tool, a Meta spokesperson described the process of age verification as “a complex, industrywide challenge,” adding that leaders in the social media space must begin to explore “novel ways to approach the dilemma of verifying someone's age when they don’t have an ID.”

Utilizing artificial intelligence is Meta’s next step in the process of satisfying lawmakers and concerned parents of teenage users. The company says its age-identifying technology will eventually go into live testing on Instagram early next year.