Making Creator Headlines · Page 8
Instagram's Age Guessing Goes Global, With Birthdays Under Review
· New York time
Meta is expanding Instagram's AI age-detection technology globally. The company says the system looks for clues that an account belongs to a teenager, including when the user has entered an adult birthday. The expansion gives the platform another way to identify younger users beyond the date supplied when an account is created. For families and creators who use Instagram, it also means an automated assessment may play a larger role in how the service distinguishes teenagers from adults. Meta presents the technology as part of its effort to protect young users. Age is a simple fact to state, but it can be harder for a platform to establish when it relies on information supplied online. A person may enter a date that does not reflect their real age, while a system looking for other clues must make an assessment from the available signals. That makes the consequences of a wrong guess an important question for any such approach. The change also reflects a larger tension in social media: platforms want to make experiences appropriate for different ages while knowing enough about users to sort them. The birthday field once did the asking. Now the platform is also doing some guessing, at global scale.
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