The AI-powered service to verify users’ age of those claiming to be 18 or older on Instagram is now ready to be rolled out to two key overseas markets, India and Brazil.
Instagram started testing this program in the US earlier this year. It uses techniques including authentication by running video selfies through an artificial intelligence system. Users can verify their age by submitting an ID. Instagram has a list of documents that it accepts for verification.
According to the market intelligence platform Sensor Tower, these countries have about 400 million monthly active users on Instagram. In an updated blog post, Instagram said that it plans to roll out the age verification program to the EU and UK before the end of the year.
Read More: Meta Rolls Out New Parental Supervision Tools On Instagram
The program enables users to upload a video of themselves, which Instagram runs through an AI system to determine whether they are 18 or older. For this, Instagram has partnered with the UK-based identity startup Yoti. Once users take a selfie video by following the on-screen instructions, Meta shares the same with Yoti for verification through its specially trained AI. Both companies claim that they delete the data later.
Instagram also said it is removing Social Vouching as an option to verify age. Social Vouching, one of the practical ways Instagram verified the age as part of the new program, allowed users to request their mutual followers, aged 18 or above, to vouch for the age. While it didn’t expand on the reason, some users were likely fooling the system by asking their mutual followers, 18 or above, to lie for them.
