Meta is expanding its AI-powered age detection worldwide, broadening a system first deployed on Instagram to Facebook and Threads as well.

The technology scans for behavioral clues suggesting an account belongs to a teenager — even when the user registered with an adult birthdate. Users the system flags as likely minors can be moved into Instagram's teen account experience, which carries stricter default privacy settings and content limits.

The global rollout marks a shift from targeted experiments to platform-wide enforcement, and it lands amid sustained regulatory pressure on social platforms over child safety. Lawmakers in several jurisdictions have pushed age-verification mandates, and Meta has argued that inference-based detection is less invasive than demanding government ID from every user.

The approach has obvious trade-offs. Behavioral age inference operates on probabilities, which means false positives — adults misclassified as teens — and false negatives are both inevitable at scale. How Meta handles appeals, and how accurate the system proves outside its original test markets, will determine whether this reads as meaningful safety infrastructure or compliance theater.