Meta has announced new AI-powered age assurance measures across all its platforms in Pakistan, aimed at supporting safe, positive online experiences for teens. Teens are automatically placed into default, age-appropriate experiences, such as Teen Accounts. The update includes advancements in age assurance technology to help ensure teens are in the right experiences for their age, along with expanded efforts to strengthen underage enforcement, including the addition of AI-driven visual analysis.
For over a decade, Meta has built tools, features, and resources to help teens have safe, age-appropriate experiences on its apps. This includes launching Teen Accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger with built-in protections that limit who can contact teens and the content they see. Content policies have also been revamped to automatically place teens under 18 into a 13+ content setting.
To ensure teens are placed in these default experiences, determining age remains essential. However, knowing someone’s age online is a complex, industry-wide challenge. Continued investment is being made in age assurance, including the use of sophisticated technology to identify people who may be teens, even if an adult birthday is listed.
Continuing to Strengthen Underage Enforcement
Users must be at least 13 to use Instagram or Facebook. For years, Meta has worked to find and remove accounts that belong to those the platform believes are underage. Today, Meta is providing more detail on its ongoing efforts to develop advanced AI that detects underage accounts, including the use of visual analysis to look beyond simple admissions of age.
This includes using AI technology to analyze entire profiles for contextual clues such as birthday celebrations or mentions of school grades to determine if an account likely belongs to someone underage. These signals are assessed across various formats, like posts, comments, bios, and captions, and with continued expansion of this technology across additional parts of Meta apps like Instagram Reels, Instagram Live, and Facebook Groups. If an account is determined to be underage, it will be deactivated and the account holder will need to provide proof of age through age verification process to prevent their account from being deleted.
Meta is also adding visual analysis as a new technique to aid detection efforts. This technology allows AI to scan photos and videos for visual clues about a person’s age that text might miss. Meta wants to be clear: this is not facial recognition. The AI looks at general themes and visual cues, for example height or bone structure, to estimate someone’s general age; it does not identify the specific person in the image. By combining these visual insights with analysis of text and interactions, this can significantly increase the number of underage accounts that are identified and removed.
In addition, Meta is making it easier for its community to report underage accounts by simplifying reporting flows. This includes making it easier to submit a report both in the app and on the Help Center. To handle these reports more effectively, Meta is supplementing human review teams with AI models that apply consistent evaluation criteria to every report. In testing, this AI-driven review delivers higher accuracy and faster resolutions than human review alone, ensuring that these accounts are addressed with more speed and reliability.
Finally, Meta is working to strengthen circumvention measures to prevent new accounts from users that are suspected to be underage.
While many of these AI improvements are available worldwide, certain advanced features like visual analysis are currently available in select countries as we work toward a broader rollout.
A Simpler Policy Approach to Age Assurance
While Meta is investing heavily in its own age assurance technology, it knows that no single company can solve this challenge alone. The company believes legislation should require app stores to verify age and provide apps and developers with this information so that they can provide age-appropriate experiences, like Teen Accounts.
The fact is, all youth safety laws require knowing people’s ages. Requiring parental approval and age verification at the App Store/OS level provides a centralized, consistent, and privacy-preserving place for age assurance, rather than requiring every individual app to comply with different rules. It also helps ensure that the many apps teens use offer the same standard of protection.