Instagram Eyes Roll Out of AI-powered Age Verification Tool

Credit: Instagram

Instagram is geared to release a set of age verification features to ensure that users receive content that is “right” for their age group, particularly those below 18. In a Twitter video posted by Instagram head Adam Mosseri, he revealed that the social platform will soon feature ID uploads, social vouching, and uploaded video selfies for age prediction as means of verification. While the first two are typical in other platforms that require signups, the last one is peculiar in that it leverages AI to infer a person’s age.

On record, Instagram set a minimum age of 13 years old for a user to create an account. However, the platform was lax in its implementation as it didn’t require aspiring users to provide their birthdates when signing up. It started asking applicants for their birthdates in 2019 and added parental and guardian controls in 2022. The upcoming verification features will keep applicants from faking their age and bar minors from seeing mature content.

The ID verification feature will be triggered when users below the age of 18 attempt to change their age to over 18. Instagram will ask them to upload a scan of an ID, which is subject to approval. Mosseri recognizes that not everyone has immediate access to IDs, thus prompting the development of the two other features.

For social vouching, Instagram will provide a list of six mutual followers over 18 to applicants. Applicants will then choose three from whom Instagram will seek verification within three days.

The AI-powered age prediction tool for video selfies sees Instagram partner with digital identity platform Yoti, whose solutions have been approved for use by the German regulators and the UK government. What makes this feature interesting is that it partially resembles a controversial piece of technology that has often made the news.

Analyzing Faces Without Recognition

Mosseri was quick to distance Instagram’s upcoming face-based age prediction tool from facial recognition technology, which allegedly produces false positives when identifying women and people of certain ethnicities. “And I want to be clear. There’s no facial recognition. There’s no way to tell what your identity is. It’s just about predicting age. [Yoti is] going to send us that information back and then delete that image,” he said. Mosseri assures that the platform will respect and safeguard its users’ privacy.

As for the technology, Instagram is confident in Yoti’s capabilities.  The artificial intelligence solution leveraged to predict ages boasts a host of impressive numbers. It has a true positive rate of 99.65% when predicting the ages of those belonging to the 13 to 17-year-old bracket and 98.91% for 6 to 11-year-olds. Equally impressive are its mean absolute errors (MAE), displaying meager error margins of 1.52 years for 13 to 19-year-olds and 1.56 years for 6 to 12-year-olds. The MAE for 6 to 70-year-olds is 2.96 years.

To assure Instagram users of its accuracy, Yoti has a page on which people can try its age estimation technology. Users can have their faces scanned in seconds without the need to provide an ID.

Besides age verification, Instagram also leverages AI to determine if a user is a teen or an adult based on their usage of the platform. Proven underage users won’t have access to more mature content like restricted ads and Facebook Dating.