Meta to kick teens off Instagram and Facebook a week early as social media ban looms
Meta says users it believes to be under 16 will receive notices like these before losing access to their accounts. (ABC News: Evan Young/Meta)
In short
Meta has begun telling Instagram, Facebook and Threads users it believes are younger than 16 years old they have two weeks left to download their data.
Account holders who want to fight their removal will have to undergo facial scans or provide ID to prove they are old enough.
What's next?
Meta is aiming to remove hundreds of thousands of accounts by the December 10 deadline, with the first accounts disappearing on December 4.
Tech giant Meta has begun giving hundreds of thousands of Australian teens a two-week warning to "download or delete" their account data from Instagram, Facebook and Threads, as the world-first social media ban looms.
The law preventing under 16s from holding accounts does not take effect until December 10, but the company will start purging accounts from December 4, as well as blocking under 16s from opening new ones.
Meta is racing to remove at least 350,000 users from Instagram and 150,000 from Facebook by the deadline, with more expected to follow.
Meta has revealed how and when it will contact users affected by the social media ban. (Reuters: Dado Ruvic/Illustration)
Today, the company began delivering the news to teens via email, SMS and within the app that they have 14 days left on the platform, "due to laws in Australia".
Messenger is the only Meta platform not currently covered by the ban.
Alongside Facebook, Instagram and Threads, the law will also apply to TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, X, Reddit and Kick.
What's next if you get a warning?
Along with a warning, Meta is giving younger users advice about next steps, prompting under 16s to download and save their posts and private messages before it is too late.
They will also be nudged to provide contact details so Meta can reach them after their 16th birthday, to reopen an account.
For those who did not receive a warning in the coming days, there were no guarantees they would not get one in the future, the company said.
Meta will first contact the users it is most confident are under 16 over the course of the next week.
But the company said it would review and improve systems for proactively detecting under 16s who have lied about their age, with AI analysis of user behaviour expected to play a significant role.
When Meta gets it wrong
Not everyone who receives a two-week warning will be under 16, and Meta has today revealed some detail on how its appeals process will work.
Users who want to challenge their removal will have to undergo facial age scans by taking a "video selfie", or provide government-issued ID such as a driver's licence.
Meta is starting the process of removing access to its apps for under 16s affected by the teen social media ban. (Reuters: Dado Ruvic/File Photo)
In Meta's case, the checks will be conducted by a company called Yoti, one of the market leaders in facial age estimation.
Yoti does not store facial data or ID after an age check has been completed, and independent testing suggests its facial scans can guess a person's age to roughly within a year, at the 18+ threshold.
However, facial age checks more generally are less accurate at the crucial 16+ threshold, and often return false positives and false negatives for people nearest to the cut-off range.
The government's own age assurance technology trial, which assessed a number of tools, including Yoti's, showed an average 13.9 per cent false negative rate for 16-year-olds using facial age checks.
Based on those results, roughly one in seven 16-year-olds could be wrongly blocked from holding an account, depending on which tool they use.
It is not clear what recourse will be available to Meta users who are wrongly flagged as under 16, wrongly blocked by facial age checks, and unable to provide government ID.
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