Meta has expanded its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered age-detection technology globally to identify teenagers who misrepresent their ages online and automatically place them under stricter safety protections on Instagram.
The company announced the expansion on Monday, November 9, 2026, alongside the introduction of Apple’s age-range signal in Australia as an additional tool for verifying users’ ages.
Meta said the global rollout would extend its Teen Account protections to millions of additional teenagers, including those who provide false dates of birth to bypass age restrictions when registering on its platforms.
The move comes amid growing regulatory pressure on social media companies to strengthen child protection and prevent underage users from accessing inappropriate online content.
According to Meta, its AI technology analyses accounts to identify users who are likely to be teenagers, even when they have entered adult birth dates during registration.
Once an account is identified as belonging to a teenager, the system automatically places it under Instagram’s Teen Account protections.
These safeguards restrict who can contact young users, limit the type of content they can access and introduce controls designed to manage their time on the platform.
The technology is intended to address a longstanding challenge facing social media companies: teenagers providing inaccurate ages to circumvent minimum-age requirements and other platform restrictions.
“Today, we’re expanding our AI age-estimation technology globally to place millions more teens in Teen Account protections on Instagram,” Meta said.
The company said its experience with the technology had been encouraging, noting that it had helped place more teenagers in age-appropriate online environments.
The current expansion focuses on Instagram, while Meta is continuing its rollout on Facebook. Similar technology is expected to begin launching globally on Threads later in 2026.
