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Meta said on November 9 that it was extending Instagram’s age estimation technology worldwide. The system looks for accounts that may belong to teenagers even when their signup birthday says they are adults. If Meta classifies an account as belonging to a teen, Instagram can put it into the app’s Teen Account settings.
Source: Zulfugar Karimov / Unsplash, Unsplash License. Cropped archive photograph of the Instagram logo displayed on a phone.
Those settings already existed. The change in Meta’s latest announcement is where the company uses its estimates to decide who gets them. Meta says it expects to bring protections to millions more teens. It did not give a completed count of accounts moved or a country-by-country timetable.
What can change on the account
The practical difference is in who can make contact and what the teen can see. Instagram’s Teen Account guide describes tighter messaging and content settings, private accounts by default in specified cases and reminders to spend less time in the app. Teens under 16 need a parent’s permission to make the protections less restrictive. A teenager using an adult birthday may therefore see familiar settings change without having entered a new birthday.
Meta treats suspected under-13 accounts as a separate issue. The company says it wants stronger tools for finding children below its minimum age as well as for identifying teens between 13 and 17. The US children’s privacy rule also concerns children under 13, though its requirements for operators are separate from the app’s settings for teenagers.
A worldwide Instagram change with two local additions
In Australia, Meta has begun using an age range provided by Apple as an extra signal. Apple’s developer documentation describes an API that provides age ranges to apps. The range can help distinguish a child, teen or adult account without giving the app an exact birthday through that signal. The Australian integration is distinct from the worldwide expansion of Instagram’s own estimates.
In the United States, Meta says parents will start seeing an explanatory video in their Instagram feeds this month. An accompanying article will be available to parents elsewhere as well. The two routes address different parts of the problem: one gives people information, while the other helps classify an account. We previously covered YouTube’s changes under Australia’s teen social media rules, a separate change with a different effect on account access.
Meta is still rolling out its estimation technology on Facebook and says similar technology will start reaching Threads globally later this year. That work differs from the Threads parental supervision tool already reported here. The present announcement puts the global change on Instagram first.
