Instagram has a problem with underage users who do not indicate their real age when registering on the social network. The service plans to combat this with the help of artificial intelligence, which automatically determines the age of the user and, if he or she is under 18, automatically switches to stricter privacy settings, Bloomberg reports.

According to Alison Hartnett, director of product management for youth and social impact at Meta, the tool analyzes a user’s account activity, list of followers and their interactions, down to birthday posts from friends, to estimate their real age.

Based on the data obtained by AI, users suspected of being under 18 will be automatically transferred to teen Instagram accounts. They were first introduced by the social network in September and have stricter privacy settings by default, such as limiting who a user can receive messages from and what type of content they can view.

This feature should go live early next year. All users under the age of 18 will be automatically transferred to teen accounts, but those who are 16 or 17 will be allowed to change strict privacy settings. But younger users will need parental consent to do so.

This new initiative comes at a time when Meta is facing legal and public scrutiny over teen safety. The company is battling lawsuits from attorneys general in several states in the United States and families who claim that Meta’s platforms contribute to mental health problems among young people. Meta’s own study, leaked in 2021 by whistleblower Frances Haugen, showed that Instagram can negatively affect the mental health of adolescents, especially girls.

As Meta expands its age restrictions, enforcement remains a challenge. Many teenagers still list their age as 18 or older, according to a British study that found one-third of underage social media users do so. Unlike the simple age verifiers that can be found on many websites, Meta is working to make it much more difficult to falsify your age on Instagram. For example, creating a new account with a different date of birth but the same email or device ID will be blocked. If a teenager tries to manually update their age, they will need to verify it with a government-issued ID or a selfie video analyzed by Yoti, a third-party service that estimates age based on facial features.

Meta did not disclose how accurately AI can determine a person’s age. Given that such systems are not 100% accurate, mistakes will happen and adult users can be transferred to a teenage account. However, the company is developing an appeal procedure for such cases. Users who are mistakenly labeled as teenagers will be able to manually change their settings without parental permission.

Meta executives also argue that a more effective solution would be for app stores to verify a user’s age before downloading certain apps. Apple, however, argues that this would go against its principles of minimizing data use, while Google notes that age verification does not have a single solution. And since, at least on Android, users can download apps directly from websites and install them manually, age verification for regular Google Play accounts is unlikely to be effective. At the same time, parental control accounts can only limit the apps that a child can download, but cannot automatically select a teenage Instagram account for them.