Instagram announced that AI age verification will be used to determine which users are teens. The goal is to place 13- to 17-year-old users in newly announced teen accounts. If Meta's artificial intelligence technology works to accurately classify adults, it will be a win for user safety and privacy relative to state-mandated age verification at the smartphone level.
Instagram, a Meta company, has recognized that "young people can lie about their date of birth" since its March 2021 report. Since then, Instagram has been developing and deploying "artificial and machine learning technology" to identify those users who falsely represent themselves as older—and younger—than they really are. The earliest application of this technology was "alert[ing] the [teenage] recipients within their DMs" when they are contacted by adults interacting disproportionately with users under 18 years old.
