Meta’s massive $18 billion settlement with U.S. states has placed age verification at the center of the company’s efforts to address concerns over children’s use of social media.
The agreement, which resolves claims that Meta designed its platforms in ways that encouraged excessive use among children, requires the company to strengthen protections for users under 18. A key part of that effort involves improving how Meta determines whether people using Facebook and Instagram are actually the ages they claim to be.
But the settlement stops short of requiring the strictest forms of identity checks, leaving Meta to navigate a complicated mix of technology, privacy concerns and child-protection laws.
How Meta Has Checked Ages So Far
Facebook and Instagram prohibit children under 13 from creating accounts, while teenagers are allowed to use the platforms under certain restrictions.
Yet verifying age has never been as straightforward as asking every user to produce identification.
Meta has largely relied on signals gathered from activity on its platforms. Those clues can include posts about birthdays, references to school years or other information that may indicate an account belongs to someone younger than the age listed on their profile.
The company has acknowledged that children can provide false birth dates when signing up.
Pressure to find a better solution has grown as governments around the world consider tighter restrictions on children’s access to social media.
Meta has also argued that age verification should not fall entirely on social media companies. The company has suggested that device makers or app stores could play a larger role in confirming a user’s age.
What the Settlement Requires Meta to Do
The agreement demands broader changes affecting young users, including daily limits on usage and restrictions on late-night push notifications.
Age assurance is another major component.
However, Meta is not being ordered to require every user to submit a government-issued ID or record a video selfie.
Instead, the settlement calls for stronger measures designed to identify accounts belonging to children, particularly those under 13.
Meta will be expected to take additional steps to detect younger users, including examining the networks connected to suspected children’s accounts. The goal is to uncover accounts that may belong to underage users and remove them from the platforms.
The company must also make it easier for users to flag accounts they believe belong to children.
An independent auditor will be allowed to examine Meta’s efforts.
The agreement also permits Meta, under certain conditions, to temporarily use information generated by children it identifies to help train artificial intelligence systems capable of spotting other suspected under-13 users.
The Privacy Problem Behind Age Verification
The biggest obstacle may not be technology. It may be the law.
Meta has previously pointed to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, known as COPPA, as a major complication.
The federal law restricts companies from collecting personal information from children under 13 without parental consent.
That creates a difficult situation for platforms trying to verify a child’s age. Some of the most reliable forms of age verification could involve collecting sensitive information, such as identification documents, biometric data or extensive records about online behavior.
Companies could potentially face legal risks for collecting information from children while attempting to confirm that those children should not be using their services in the first place.
Child-safety advocates, however, have argued that technology companies have sometimes emphasized these legal complications while failing to do enough to prevent underage users from joining their platforms.
A Narrow Path Between Safety and Privacy
The settlement attempts to balance those competing concerns.
A separate New Mexico court ruling involving Meta also confronted the same problem. The court concluded that federal privacy protections limited the ability to require children to submit personal information or be extensively tracked online simply to establish their ages.
The ruling instead focused on improving age detection without crossing the boundaries established by COPPA.
Meta’s multistate settlement follows a similar approach.
The Federal Trade Commission has also taken steps that could make age verification easier. In a policy statement issued earlier this year, the agency said it would not pursue enforcement action against companies collecting personal information solely for the purpose of determining a user’s age through verification technology.
That does not eliminate every legal risk.
States can still enforce child-privacy laws independently, meaning companies could face legal challenges even if federal regulators decline to take action.
Several states had included privacy-related claims in their cases against Meta before those allegations were dropped as part of the settlement.
What Happens Next?
Meta’s agreement signals that simply asking users to enter a birth date may no longer be enough.
The company is now expected to become more active in identifying accounts that may belong to children, while avoiding verification systems that could create new privacy concerns.
That leaves Meta facing a difficult challenge: finding underage users without collecting so much information that the process itself creates another legal problem.
The $18 billion settlement does not provide a single technological answer. Instead, it pushes Meta toward a more aggressive system of detection, reporting and auditing—while the debate over who should verify children’s ages, and how that should be done, continues.
