Meta announced on Monday that it will expand the AI age estimation technology, currently available on Instagram, to a global scale. This expansion aims to identify more teenagers and include them in the Teen Accounts protection mechanism. The company is facing multiple lawsuits accusing its platform of causing harm to teenagers.

This social media giant stated that even if users provide the birthdays of adults, it will still use this AI technology to identify users that it suspects are teenagers.

Teen Accounts will place users in a more stringent account experience, providing additional protection. For example, it only allows private messages from users they follow or with whom they have established contact, hides harmful comments, and sets the accounts to private by default.

Meta indicates that its age identification tool utilizes AI to analyze contextual clues throughout an individual's profile, such as content related to birthday celebrations or information mentioning school grades. Meta also searches for these signals across different formats, including posts, comments, personal profiles, captions, etc. The company also examines visual clues in photos and videos, such as a person's height or skeletal structure.

According to Meta, the company is continuing to promote this technology to Facebook and plans to carry out a similar global promotion in Threads later this year.

During this global expansion, Meta reached a settlement with nearly all states and territories in the United States in August for a total amount of up to $18 billion to resolve lawsuits regarding its platform's harm to teenagers. As part of the settlement, Meta agreed to improve its methods of identifying teenagers and children under the age of 13.

Meta wrote in a blog post: "We will continue to do our part to actively ensure that teenagers have an experience on our platform that is suitable for their age. This is why, as part of an agreement we have reached with 52 attorneys general from various states, territories, and the District of Columbia in the United States, we are investing in more advanced technology to proactively identify accounts that may belong to children under the age of 13. We are also strengthening the technology used to identify accounts that may belong to teenagers aged 13 to 17, to ensure that these accounts are directed to experiences designed specifically for them, even if they provide an adult's birthday as information."

Meta indicates that parents in the United States will begin to see a video within the Instagram information stream, explaining how the company ensures that teenagers receive appropriate protection.