Safety advocates have been criticizing social media sites such as Instagram for failing to guard the young users from signing up in the platform despite of not meeting the age requirement.
In a previous report by iTechPost, UK media watchdog Ofcom said that children aged eight to 17 were able to skirt the age restriction of social media platforms by using a falsified birthday to appear older.
To address the issue, Instagram started testing a program in the U.S. involving artificial intelligence (AI) system to verify the social media users' age. And the program is ready to roll out in India and Brazil, according to the Meta-owned company.
Instagram Partners With Yoti to Bring AI Age Verification System Program
According to TechCrunch, India and Brazil have an average of 400 million active Instagram users.
While the percentage of young users are not specified in the report, we can assume that a large percentage of these 400 million are young people.
With the AI system age verification program, it would help prevent children from setting up a social media account using adult profile.
According to Ofcom, one of the dangers of faking age in social media is the young people are able to access adult and harmful contents which are not suitable for their age.
The program works by allowing users to upload a video of themselves. Instagram will then run the video through an AI system to identify whether they are indeed aged 18 or older.
The Meta-owned company said in a blog post that it has partnered with the UK-based identity startup Yoti for the AI system age verification.
Users just need to follow the on-screen instruction in taking a video selfie. Once this step is completed, Meta will sahre the video with Yoti. The age of the user is then verified through its specially trained AI.
According to Yoti and Instagram, to protect the privacy of the users, they delete the data afterward.
Read Also: The UK Has Become A 'Smartphone Society'
AI System Age Verification Program Will Also Roll Out in UK, EU
In an updated blog post of Instagram, the company said that aside from India and Brazil, it also plans to roll out this age verification program to the UK and EU before the end of the year.
This is a good move as the Ofcom study revealed that 32% of children aged eight to 17 in the UK have a user age of 18 or over, as per iTechPost. In addition, 47% of the children aged eight to 15 have a user age of 16 or over.
In addition to the AI system age verification program, Instagram will also allow its users to verify their age through providing an ID.
Meanwhile, the social media company said that they will no longer use Social Vouching as an option to verify age. With Social Vouching, mutual followers who are aged 18 and above can vouch the age of a user.
The problem with Social Vouching is users might just convince their mutual followers to lie in their behalf resulting to falsified age.
Instagram rolls out the new age verification means amid scrutiny from safety advocates. These groups are criticizing the social media for not being vigilant enough in employing its policy that kids under 13 cannot use the platform.
While the platform requires users to enter their age when creating a profile, there are those who use false birth dates.
Related Article: Ofcom Says One-Third of Children Ages 8-17 Pretend to be Adults in Social Media
