Facebook and Instagram to Use AI to Read Children's Bone Structure

Ensuring the true age of internet users has been a problem since the early days of the online world. Many websites and social media platforms have implemented age restriction systems, but these tactics often prove ineffective in practice.

Usually, children under the legal age can easily circumvent these rules simply by falsifying their birth year during registration.

On the other hand, when companies attempt to enforce very strict age verification rules, such decisions almost always result in waves of protests from users.

Stemming from this issue, Meta is now taking an aggressive step.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram is reportedly implementing a new AI-powered protection system to detect and eradicate accounts belonging to users suspected of being under 13 years old.

Unlike conventional verification systems, Meta is using a stealth detection approach through AI technology. This artificial intelligence system works by combining two main methods: text analysis and visual scanning.

For visual scanning, Meta’s AI will observe users’ photos and videos to look for specific physical clues.

Instead of simply looking at the face, the system is specifically trained to analyse body posture, such as height up to bone structure, to estimate whether the account owner is still considered a child or old enough.

Meanwhile, in terms of text analysis, Meta’s algorithms will scour user activities on the platform for supporting signals. These signals could include birthday celebration posts or chats mentioning grades or school reports.

Meta believes that the combination of these two scanning methods can catch “bocil” (young children) accounts that have previously slipped through standard verification systems.

In other words, the artificial intelligence system is not tasked with identifying the real identity of the person in the photo.

This AI purely works in an abstract manner to estimate a general age range of someone based on the visual context captured, without needing to know the user’s real name.

Of course, the effectiveness of this abstract technology still piques curiosity, as summarised by KompasTekno from Neowin.

Some parties hope that Meta has trained its AI smartly enough not to automatically classify a “moustache” as an absolute adult feature.