Lying about your birthday on Instagram is about to stop working. Meta announced today that it's expanding its AI age-estimation technology globally, using software to guess whether an account belongs to a teenager — and moving suspected teens into Teen Account protections whether or not the birthday on file says they're an adult.
"We use AI technology to find people we suspect to be teens, even if they use an adult birthday, and place them in Teen Account protections," Meta said in the announcement. "Since first introducing this technology, we've been placing more teens in age-appropriate protections and are encouraged by the results. Based on that success, today we're expanding this technology globally."
The system looks at signals like the profiles and posts an account interacts with, birthday messages, and visual cues from photos — Meta stresses the visual analysis is age estimation, not facial recognition, and doesn't identify who's in a picture. Accounts it believes belong to children under 13 get blocked; those it places at 13 to 17 land in Teen Accounts, with age-appropriate feeds, limits on who can contact them, and default time-management tools.
This completes a staged rollout that began in the US in April 2025 and reached the UK, Canada, Australia, the EU, and Brazil since. Meta says the global expansion will put "millions more teens" under the stricter settings, with Facebook still rolling out and Threads to follow later this year. In Australia, Meta has also started using Apple's age-range signal as an additional check.
The timing isn't accidental. The expansion follows Meta's August agreement with 52 bipartisan state attorneys general to strengthen age assurance — a deal that came after years of lawsuits and hearings arguing the company's age gates were trivially easy to defeat.
Parents are about to hear about it directly. Meta says parents in the US will begin seeing an in-feed Instagram video this month explaining how the age checks work, linking to an article by internet safety advocate Larry Magid of ConnectSafely about the company's multi-layered approach — and US parents will also start receiving notifications about the system.
What to watch: Meta hasn't published error rates, per-country start dates, or appeal numbers, so how many adults get wrongly swept into Teen Accounts — and how easily they can get out — is still open. For years, the birthday field was the whole system. Now the system is watching what you do instead.
— via 9to5Mac