Instagram's AI Age Checks Go Global to Catch Teens Lying About Birthdays

Meta is taking its age-guessing AI global. The company announced it's expanding the age estimation tech it uses to flag Instagram users who haven't declared their real age, and the rollout will automatically drop "millions more teens" into Teen Account protections. The tools first went live in the US, EU and Brazil last year.

The system doesn't rely on users fessing up. It hunts for signals that someone is likely under 18 — the profiles and content they interact with, birthday messages they get, and what Meta calls "general themes and visual cues" pulled from uploaded photos and videos, including height and bone structure. In Australia, Meta has also started leaning on Apple's age-range signal as an extra detection method.

The stakes are blunt: users believed to be under 13 get removed, since that's the minimum age for Meta accounts. Anyone pegged at 13 to 17 lands in a Teen Account regardless of whether they signed up with a fake adult birthday. Those accounts are private by default, cap what content teens see, and block strangers from sliding into their DMs. Parents can supervise, set time limits and monitor activity, and users 16 or younger can't loosen the settings without a guardian's sign-off.

Parents in the US will get an in-app notification starting next month explaining how the age estimation works and how to make sure their teen's age is accurate on the platform. The expansion follows a $17.1 billion lawsuit settlement in August, in which Meta agreed to strengthen its age assurance practices and tighten restrictions on teen users. Meta hasn't said whether the automatic age checks on Facebook — live for US accounts since May — will travel abroad too.