Meta is expanding its artificial intelligence age-estimation technology worldwide, including across Asia-Pacific, to place more suspected teen users into Instagram’s built-in Teen Account protections even when they enter an adult birthday.
The company said in a statement that the global rollout is expected to cover millions more teens. Teen Accounts restrict who can contact younger users, the content they can see and the amount of time they spend on Meta’s apps.
Meta uses profile and account signals to estimate whether a user is likely to be a teenager. The company said the technology is designed to identify users aged 13 to 17 who may have provided an adult birth date and place them into age-appropriate settings.
The expansion is distinct from content-setting changes that Meta introduced earlier in 2026. Those changes put teens into a default 13-plus experience and offered parents a stricter Limited Content option. The new announcement focuses on identifying accounts that should receive those protections.
Meta did not publish accuracy rates, false-positive figures, country-level deployment numbers or an independent assessment of the system in its announcement. Its claim that the technology has produced encouraging results is company-supplied.
In Australia, Meta has begun using Apple’s age-range signal as an additional input. When a parent sets up a device for a teenager, Apple’s system can assign an age range and pass that range to an app developer when an app is downloaded. Meta said it is using the signal voluntarily and argues that device-level signals can reduce the need for each platform to conduct separate age checks.
The company said it continues to use its own age-estimation technology as a backstop. Meta is also rolling the technology out on Facebook and plans to begin a similar global rollout on Threads later in 2026.
Meta’s expansion comes as governments across Asia-Pacific and other regions introduce or consider stricter online-safety and age-assurance requirements. The company said national approaches differ, with some requiring broad identity checks and others leaving the method of determining age to platforms.
The technology is part of a wider effort to identify accounts that may belong to children under 13 as well as teenagers using adult birthdays. Meta said it is strengthening those systems under an agreement with 52 US state and territorial attorneys general, while calling on other large video and social platforms to adopt similar practices.
Meta expands Instagram teen safety controls, adds stricter content limits in Malaysia