- Meta is implementing new artificial intelligence tools to verify ages
- Instagram and Facebook are for users over 13 years old.
- A “visual analysis” will weigh height and bone structure
Age verification for sites, apps and devices is quickly becoming the norm as regulators seek to protect children from potentially harmful content, including social media content. Now Meta has announced new “age guarantee measures” for teenage users and, as expected, they are powered by AI.
Specifically, the system will use contextual clues associated with a profile (such as mentions of birthdays or school grades) along with “visual analysis” to help determine a user’s age.
“We want to be clear: this is not facial recognition,” says Meta. “Our AI analyzes general themes and visual cues, for example, height or bone structure, to estimate a person’s overall age; it does not identify the specific person in the image.”
Users suspected of being too young for Facebook and Instagram (i.e. under 13 years old) will have their accounts deactivated. They will then need to provide some form of proof of age through a specific age verification process to recover their account.
‘Safe and positive online experiences’
Other Facebook and Instagram users can report accounts they believe are being used by children under 13, and Meta says it hopes to “significantly increase the number of underage accounts we identify and remove” through these methods.
“We want young people to have safe and positive experiences online,” says Meta (although some disagree). “For more than a decade, we’ve created tools, features and resources to help teens have safe, age-appropriate experiences on our apps.”
Similar AI techniques are already being used to detect teens on Meta platforms and guide them to teen-appropriate spaces on these platforms. This technology is now expanding to more regions (including Facebook in the US and UK).
Meta’s announcement ends with a familiar call we’ve heard before from app and website developers: force age verification at the device level, making it a problem for Apple, Google, and Microsoft rather than Meta.
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