Lying About Your Age on Instagram Won’t Work Much Longer. Meta’s SI Is Now Checking Teens Worldwide.

Every parent knows the trick. A 14-year-old wants the full Instagram experience, so she types in a birthday that makes her 19. For years that was about all it took. Meta now says that trick is going to stop working, pretty much everywhere on the planet.

The company announced this week that it’s taking the SI system it uses to sniff out teens who lied about their age and switching it on for Instagram users worldwide. Meta says the result will be “millions more teens” moved into its restricted Teen Accounts, “even if they use an adult birthday to set up an account.” The same system is still rolling out on Facebook, and Meta says a version is coming to Threads around the world later this year.

This isn’t brand new tech. The Verge reports Meta first launched these age checks in the U.S., the European Union and Brazil last year, and Al Jazeera says it was already running in more than 20 countries before this week. What changed is the reach. Meta says it’s “encouraged by the results” and is now going global.

It reads the whole profile, not the birthday

So how does a computer decide your kid is 14 when she swore she was 19? According to TechCrunch, Meta’s system looks across an entire profile for clues. That means things like birthday celebrations or mentions of what grade someone is in, pulled from posts, comments, bios and captions alike. It also looks at photos and videos for visual cues, including a person’s height or bone structure.

Meta told Al Jazeera that the photo and video check doesn’t extend to facial recognition. That distinction will matter to a lot of families, though it’s a promise parents will have to take on Meta’s word for now.

Once the system flags an account, it gets moved into a Teen Account. The Verge lays out what that means. The account goes private by default, strangers can’t send direct messages, and the content feed is more limited. Parents can choose to supervise the account and set time limits, and anyone 16 or younger can’t loosen those settings without a parent signing off. In countries that ban social media below a certain age, Al Jazeera reports the account may simply be shut down.

A heads-up is coming to your feed

If you’re a parent in the U.S., expect to hear about this from Instagram itself. Meta says that this month, American parents will start seeing a video in their feed explaining how the company places teens into these protections and how parents can make sure their kid’s age is listed correctly. The video links to an article by Larry Magid, an internet safety advocate who runs the nonprofit ConnectSafely.

That’s worth paying attention to. If the system gets your teenager’s age wrong in either direction, the fix runs through you.

Meta wants the app stores to carry the load

There’s a bigger fight tucked inside this announcement, and Meta isn’t shy about it. In Australia, the company has started using Apple’s age-range signal. When a parent sets up an iPhone for a teen, the App Store can confirm the age range of the person using the phone and pass it along to every app the teen downloads.

Meta says that works, but only if everyone has to do it. As long as the signal is optional for app stores and optional for developers, Meta argues, “teens will receive inconsistent protections across the many apps they use.” The company says it has long backed laws requiring age verification and parental consent at the app store level. “One verified signal from people’s devices, shared consistently with all apps, is far more effective and privacy-preserving than asking every platform to verify age individually,” Meta wrote.

Put plainly, Meta would rather the app stores check ages at the front door than have every app guess at the back. It’s also calling out its rivals by name, saying it wants TikTok and YouTube to adopt the same practices.

The lawsuits behind the timing

None of this happens in a vacuum. Reuters and TechCrunch both note the expansion comes as Meta faces a pile of lawsuits accusing its platforms of harming young users. Meta itself ties the move to a recent agreement with 52 bipartisan attorneys general across U.S. states, territories and Washington, D.C., to get better at identifying teens and kids under 13. As part of that deal, the company says it’s investing in stronger technology to catch accounts that may belong to children under 13, who aren’t supposed to be on the apps at all.

Meta also took a shot at the patchwork of new teen safety laws around the world. Many of them, it says, “don’t explain how technology companies should determine a user’s age,” with some requiring “invasive age checks for everyone” and others offering no guidance at all.

A London professor wants proof

The skeptics have a fair point about proof. Sonia Livingstone, a professor at the London School of Economics who studies kids and digital media, told Al Jazeera there’s an “absence of clear evidence” that young children are being kept off the platforms or that teens are actually landing in Teen Accounts.

She also raised the privacy question that comes with any system like this. Age checks, she said, pose “a privacy risk to all users, not just children, since the point of age assurance is to figure out who the children are.” Without independent audits, she added, “it is hard to see why we should trust them with our personal data.”

That tension is the whole story. To find the kids, the machine has to read everybody. Meta says it’s doing that carefully and without facial recognition. Parents who’d rather not take that on faith still have the oldest tool there is: knowing what birthday their kid typed in, and checking the account themselves.