Online Safety and Well-Being

Lesson 4: Age Assurance

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Of course in order to create age appropriate experiences for teens, we need to know that a teen is a teen. This is a challenging and complicated problem, as teens may lie about their age.

Here’s how we think about age and our layered approach:

Our approach to age is one that we’re focused on how to get right - but it’s a work in progress.

We’re exploring expanding our age prediction technology to detect when someone may be misrepresenting their age, specifically whether someone is a teen under 18 or not. If we feel confident that someone is likely a teen we’ll place them in protective, age-appropriate settings. If we make a mistake, people can verify their age to reinstate the correct settings.

In addition to preventing age misrepresentation, we’re also taking steps to minimize people from setting up supervision relationships improperly.

Parental supervision on Instagram is opt-in, and requires both a teen and a parent or guardian to consent to the experience.

In addition to requiring consent, we take a number of steps to confirm that someone is eligible to supervise a teen’s account. If we determine a parent or guardian is not eligible, they are blocked from the supervision experience.

These steps include confirming a teen isn’t trying to supervise themselves, making sure an account that is being supervised cannot supervise another account, and limiting the number of accounts that a parent or guardian can supervise.

Additionally age information:

• Since 2022, we’ve required teens to prove their age through a video selfie or ID check if they attempt to change their birthday from under the age of 18 to over 18. In addition, if a teen attempts to update their birthday from a younger age to an older age, we require them to prove their age with an ID check.
• We’ll limit teens from attempting to create a new, adult account in a number of ways.This includes, for example, using information about a teen’s original account to prevent them from creating and using an account with an adult age (unless they prove their age with an ID check) or preventing teens from linking their accounts to accounts with adult ages.
• We’re not sharing information about all of the measures we’re putting in place, because we don’t want to give teens an instruction manual on how to get around our efforts.

Sources

• fb.com/safety/parents
• about.instagram.com/community/parents
• fb.com/help
• fb.com/help/instagram
• fb.com/safety

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