Meta to Use AI to Detect and Move Teens to Protected Accounts
Meta has begun testing artificial intelligence (AI) technology to detect teens using its platforms. This comes after the company recently expanded teen accounts from Instagram to Facebook and Messenger as well. Teen accounts come with certain built-in protections such as a limit on who can contact the user, and the content the user sees. Further, under-16 account holders cannot carry out live streams on Instagram without parental permission. Teens also require parental permission to turn off the feature that blurs images containing suspected nudity in direct messages (DMs).
Enrolling Teens into Teen Accounts
In a recent blog post discussing ways to enroll teens into teen accounts, the company noted that parents do not always have time to review the settings of their teenage children’s social media accounts. As such, the company says that in cases where its AI technology detects teens, it will move them to teen accounts even if the user’s age listed with the account is 18 or above.
AI Technology for Age Detection
Meta has been using AI technology to identify adult users of its services for some time now. In a 2022 blog post, the company explained that to create an adult classifier model, it first trains the AI model on information such as when the user created an account, interactions with others, and content. It argues that people in the same age group react similarly to the same kind of content. Such signals allow the AI model to calculate the user’s age. The model is then evaluated by Meta’s team, who manually review data points that are strong indicators of a user’s age. Meta says that it evaluates the model on a country-by-country basis.
Besides carrying out age detection on its own, in 2022, the company also partnered with the UK-based identity verification service Yoti to verify user age based on a video selfie. Yoti uses AI for identity verification and trains its models on “anonymous images of diverse people from around the world.”
Relevance of Age Detection Efforts
Meta’s age detection efforts are relevant in the context of the growing demand to regulate the social media usage of individuals under 18. Some countries like Australia have banned social media for under-16s, while others like the UK are considering it. India has put restrictions on processing the personal data of anyone under the age of 18 as part of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, which requires platforms to obtain verifiable parental consent before processing the data of anyone under 18.
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