Social media companies are rolling out new technology — AI photo analysis, face-scanning selfies and government ID checks among them — to figure out exactly which of their users are children.
“By combining these visual insights with our analysis of text and interactions, we can significantly increase the number of underage accounts we identify and remove,” Meta said, describing how it now scans photos for cues like height and bone structure alongside a user’s posts and habits. The statement is part of a much larger reckoning across the industry over how platforms verify a user’s age — and what happens to the data collected trying to prove it.
Movieguide® reported last month on Meta’s roughly $17 billion settlement with dozens of state attorneys general over claims it knowingly designed Instagram and Facebook to be addictive to kids. That settlement gives Meta one year to sharpen its age-checking systems, with third-party audits and specific accuracy targets built into the deal. Age verification, it turns out, is the hinge everything else swings on — none of the other safety measures work if a platform can’t tell which accounts belong to minors in the first place.
Right now, companies lean on two basic methods. The first is straightforward but unpopular: Meta accepts a government-issued ID, like a driver’s license or passport, and promises to delete it within 30 days.
Most users, understandably, don’t love handing a tech company a scan of their driver’s license. The second method skips documents altogether and lets AI guess instead.
Meta’s system studies contextual clues — birthday posts, mentions of school, friend networks, login timing — and cross-references those against photos for physical signs of age. YouTube leans on a user’s watch history to do something similar.
Related: Battle Rages Over Age Verification Laws — What Parents Should Know
Roblox takes a more direct approach, asking players to submit a video selfie before they can chat with other users, a step the company says estimates a player’s age within a year or two for anyone between 5 and 25. Outside experts have raised questions about how reliable that accuracy really is across different ages and demographics, and identity-verification firms Yoti and Persona offer similar face-scanning tools to other platforms.
Not everyone agrees on who should be doing the verifying. Meta and others have floated shifting the job to app stores, letting Apple and Google check ages before a download ever happens.
Google isn’t sold on it. “This proposal fails to cover desktop computers or other devices that are commonly shared within families,” the company said in response.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy group, isn’t sold on any of it. “Once that valuable data is collected, it can easily be leaked, hacked, or misused,” the group warned, arguing that every verification method — ID scans, face scans, behavioral tracking — ties a user’s real-world identity to their online activity in ways that can’t easily be undone.
That tension sits right where Christian parents already live: wanting real protection for kids online while staying wary of handing tech companies even more data about their families. Movieguide® has long argued that no amount of algorithmic sophistication replaces a parent who actually knows what their child is doing online.
This technology might catch more underage accounts than the honor system it’s replacing. It won’t catch a kid who’s logged in on mom’s phone, and it won’t replace the conversation happening — or not happening — at the dinner table.
Read Next: Social Media’s ‘Age Verification Trap’ — What Parents Need to Know
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