Meta’s Developing an AI System To Detect Teens Lying About Their Age

Meta’s looking to utilize AI to detect users who are lying about their age in its apps, in an expanded effort to limit potentially harmful exposure to youngsters across Facebook and Instagram.

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Meta’s developing a new AI-based system that will be able to detect youngsters who’ve lied about their age.

As per Bloomberg:

“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. 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.”

Meta initially flagged this coming technology back in September, noting that it will go into live testing on Instagram early in the new year.

That’ll give Meta another tool in its efforts to protect youngsters, amid rising scrutiny of its apps, and their harmful impacts on teens.  

Indeed, various regions are currently weighing potential age limits on social media access, in an effort to better protect youngsters from such harms. Regulators in Australia, Denmark, the U.S., and the U.K., among others, are exploring potential age restrictions, which, if enacted, would also eat into the user counts of Meta’s apps.

So, unsurprisingly, Meta’s looking to take more action to avoid this, while Meta has also suggested that app stores should be responsible for enforcing age restrictions on app use, in order to make it more difficult for youngsters to create accounts.

That proposal seems to have fallen on mostly deaf ears for now, returning the pressure back onto the platforms themselves. And as such, new systems like this could provide more assurance, and improved detection through systematic means.

Instagram already has a range of measures in place to stop youngsters from signing up as adults, including its age verification process, which requires selected users to provide a government ID, or get friends or parents to confirm their age, while it’s also implemented advanced protections for teen accounts, in order to better protect young users from harmful exposure in the app,

So Meta is taking action, and this new detection AI would be another advance on this front.

Of course, kids will find a way around these as well. With this in mind, there is merit to Meta’s case that the app stores are best-placed to implement restrictions of this type.

But till that goes ahead, we’ll have to settle for whatever measures the platforms can implement.