By Foo Yun Chee
BRUSSELS, May 5 (Reuters) – Meta Platforms will expand safeguards for teen accounts to 27 European Union countries and to Facebook in the United States, the U.S. tech giant said on Tuesday, as it comes under pressure from regulators to better protect young people online.
Tech companies broadly are facing a challenge from authorities worldwide to come up with better age-checking measures over mounting concerns about online abuse, teen mental health and the spread of AI-generated child sexual images.
European countries are widely pushing to clamp down on teen access to social media, while on Monday the U.S. state of New Mexico asked a judge to declare Meta a public nuisance, fine it $3.7 billion and overhaul its platforms to protect young users.
Meta last year rolled out technology to proactively find accounts it suspects to be teens, even if they list an adult birthday, and place them in Teen Account protections.
“This technology will be expanded to 27 countries in the European Union. Meta is also expanding this technology to Facebook in the United States for the first time, with the UK and EU to follow in June,” the company said in a blogpost.
It also detailed its use of advanced artificial intelligence to detect underage accounts beyond simple admissions of age.
This includes using AI technology to analyze entire profiles for contextual clues to determine if an account likely belongs to someone underage and strengthening circumvention measures to prevent new accounts from users Meta suspects are underage.
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee, Editing by Charlotte Van Campenhout and Chizu Nomiyama )
