Photo-sharing platform Instagram said Thursday it was beginning trials of an artificial intelligence (AI)-based tool to verify the age of users in the United States.
Lawmakers around the world have clamored for US tech giant Meta’s social media service to protect young people from adult content and invasions of their privacy.
It’s a thorny problem that tech companies say won’t be easy to solve, but could be addressed with broader technological changes, such as: B. Dates of birth tied to a person’s mobile phone.
Meta announced testing of new verification tools for anyone attempting to change their age from under 18 to over 18 on the platform, including taking a video selfie or asking friends to verify their age.
“We test this to ensure teens and adults have the right experience for their age group,” Meta said.
The video selfies will be sent to British company Yoti, which has developed an AI tool that can accurately determine the age of under-20s to within 1.5 years.
Although Yoti’s own data suggests that its tool is generally worse at checking the ages of women and girls, as well as people with darker skin.
Both Yoti and Meta said the selfies would be deleted after verification.
Last year, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri told US lawmakers he felt it wasn’t Instagram’s job to verify users’ ages.
“I think it would be much more effective to have device-level age verification,” he said.
He suggested parents make sure the kid’s phone knows the age, “unlike every app, and there are millions of apps out there that try to check the age themselves.”
Instagram was rocked last year by revelations by whistleblower Frances Haugen that suggested executives were aware the platform could be affecting the mental health of young people, especially teenage girls.
Since then, several features aimed at protecting younger users have been introduced.
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