Instagram Uses AI to Automatically Register Minors in ‘teen Accounts’
Meta takes the teens who use its services seriously. Last year, the company launched “Teen Accounts” for Instagram, which add a number of restrictions and features for users under 18. Earlier this month , Meta also rolled out teen accounts on Facebook and Messenger , and extended some of those restrictions specifically for Instagram.
If your teen had a standard Instagram account when Meta started rolling this out, their account was automatically changed to a teen account. Of course, this only worked if their actual age was associated with the account: if a teen said they were 18 or older on their birthday, there would be no teen account for them.
Meta’s AI knocks on teens’ Instagrams
In response to this loophole, Meta tasks its AI with rooting out teenagers posing as adults on Instagram . The company announced the experiment on Monday, saying trials would begin in the United States the same day. The meta here briefly outlines the details, but they say that if the AI detects a standard account that it suspects is a teen account, it will automatically switch them to a teen account, even if that account has an adult’s birthday.
This isn’t Meta AI’s first rodeo either. Since 2022, the company has been using an artificial intelligence model trained to detect whether a user is underage. The AI model looks for behaviors associated with teenage users because people in the same age group respond similarly to certain types of content, according to Mehta. (Think of all those memes you don’t understand .)
One interesting piece of information that comes with birthday messages is that the AI looks at how users interact with an account on their birthday and can make a decision based on that. If the AI sees a lot of messages and private messages saying “happy 17th birthday”, it will be quite obvious, but even if the messages match the way users under 18 usually wish each other a happy birthday, the AI will quickly become suspicious.
What happens if the AI makes a mistake?
There are probably many parents who have no problem with Instagram automatically changing their children’s profiles to those of teenagers. But this technology is AI-driven, and the AI doesn’t always get it right : so there’s a good chance that the AI will accidentally label adult accounts as teens, locking out users 18 and older with restrictions meant for minors.
This means that your account will automatically be subject to some pretty tight restrictions: you’ll be made private if you haven’t already, and adult users won’t be able to see your posts or send you private messages without first subscribing. You won’t see “violent” content or posts promoting cosmetic procedures. (Probably no loss.) Instagram will also alert you whenever you use the app for 60 minutes a day, advising you to stop. And although you don’t need it, your account will go into “sleep mode” from 10 pm to 7 am, turning off alerts and sending automatic replies to private messages. (To be fair, maybe a lot of us adults would benefit from these restrictions.)
If Instagram thinks you’re 16 or 17 years old, you’ll be able to manually turn off some of these restrictions, but that’s not the point. If you’re an adult, you shouldn’t expect Instagram to change your account settings because its AI bot made a mistake. Meta knows this too. According to the company’s blog post, “We take steps to ensure the accuracy of our technology and that the teens we identify are correctly placed in protective, age-appropriate settings, but if we make an error, we give people the opportunity to change their settings.”
The company hasn’t yet revealed exactly what mitigation measures this represents, so I’ll update this article once we know for sure. However, I assume there will be an option in the settings to verify your age and move your account back to an adult account.