Meta Platforms Says It’s Testing New AI That Identifies Instagram Users Below the Age Limit

Tech giant Meta is busy working on new AI tech that can assist the company in identifying those users who are below the required age limit. Once that’s done, the company plans to automatically enroll them into their respective Teen Accounts.

The feature of Teen Accounts was shared in September last year and was working well to switch teens into protective accounts. This was limited to teens who signed up for accounts through their actual ages.

For now, the organization says the latest AI tech would proactively look for accounts that they suspect belong to teens, even if the accounts list another adult's birthday. The feature is rolling out in beta right now for those in the US.

Meta thanks AI that assists them in determining the right age ranges for a while now, but also gives rise to new changes. In cases where there is a mistake, it gives people the chance to alter settings to ensure greater protection and predictions.

All Teens on the Meta Platforms are getting grouped into 13 to 17 year old individuals, where adults are listed as anyone who’s 18 and above. The company does realize that not everyone is honest all the time about their ages, and that’s a major problem in the country, as it misrepresents the user base.

A report shared in February spoke about how 80% of all kids under the age of 13 tend to bypass any age restriction policies on these apps, such as TikTok, Snap, and YouTube. Today, it hopes to expand further on this front so that it can keep teens safe at all times.

The latest push is involving parents, where it enrolled nearly 54M teenagers in these protective accounts around the globe. The majority fell in the 13 to 15 year age bracket and hence were protected with the right safeguards.

Also beginning Monday, the company says it will start rolling out alerts to parents through the app so they can better control ownership and keep tabs on what the kids are doing. This is why finding the right age for signing up to Meta’s platforms is important, it added.

Furthermore, Meta wants parents to keep a check and confirm ages on not only one app but all of them. They want kids to have the best online experience that’s age-appropriate. Remember, it’s not easy to determine the age of people online in such a large industry. But the best way appears to be getting approval from parents and age verification through the App Store.

Today, Teen Accounts have in-built security that restricts the time kids are spending online and the kinds of content they’re exposed to. They can also restrict who they contact via DMs. Any explicit content found inside Direct Messages wouldn’t go unnoticed. Moreover, if there’s nudity, then censorship would come into play. Moreover, teen accounts also get banned from going live.

Meta says the majority of parents in a survey approved Teen Account protections and said they’re useful. Such accounts were rolled out for apps like Facebook and Messenger across nations like Canada, the US, the United Kingdom, and Australia last week. It hopes to add more countries to the list very soon.

Read next: From Vice to Vox: YouTube News Channels See Surge in Growth, Views, and Global Influence
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

From Vice to Vox: YouTube News Channels See Surge in Growth, Views, and Global Influence

According to an analysis by Press Gazette, there are 115 English-language publisher accounts on YouTube with at least a million followers. The most popular UK newspaper on YouTube is The Sun with six million subscribers. Press Gazette found that there was a 20% increase in subscribers of news publishers on YouTube in the past 15 years, while the video views have risen 25%. Many news publishers are focusing on YouTube because it makes about 10% of TV viewing in the US.

Overall, the most subscribed news publisher on YouTube is Vice with 18.7 million subscribers, followed by ABC News (US) with 18 million subscribers. CNN has 17.4 million subscribers on Youtube while BBC news has 17.2 million subscribers. Other news channels which have more than ten million subscribers on YouTube are Al Jazeera English (15.1 million), NDTV (14.3 million), Inside Edition (13.5 million), Fox News (12.6 million), Vox (12.4 million) and NBC News (10.8 million). The crown for most all-time video views at nearly 25 billion goes to Inside Edition, followed by Fox and CNN while The Sun is the most watched newspaper channel.

Some of the biggest news publishers on Youtube are Vice, ABC News (US), CNN and BBC news. Some other big news publishers on Youtube included in the top ten are Al Jazeera English, NDTV, Inside Edition, Fox News, Vox and NBC News. There are also a lot of news influencer accounts on Youtube apart from traditional news companies which have been ranked by Press Gazette. The Joe Rogan Experience Youtube channel tops the list with 19 million subscribers, followed by Ben Shapiro and The Philip DeFranco Show with 7.2 million and 6.6 million subscribers respectively. Piers Morgan Uncensored and Tucker Carlson have 3.6 million subscribers each.

The news publishers with the highest average views are Vox (2 million), Insider Science (1 million) and Vice (1 million). All other news publishers have less than a million average views on Youtube. There are also some news personality YouTube accounts with one million or more views per video. These Youtube accounts include The Joe Rogan Experience (2 million), Legal Eagle (1 million), The Philip DeFranco Show (1 million).

The YouTube channels which saw the most increase in subscribers between October 2023 and January 2025 were TRT World (4 million), ANI News (3.8 million) and Al Jazeera English (3.4 million). Some small news channels like Piers Morgan Uncensored also added 1.8 million subscribers in the past 15 months and E! News added one million subscribers. Because of this increase in subscribers, the fastest growing Youtube news channels were ANI News (107%), TRT World (103%) and Piers Morgan Uncensored (95%). The most watched Youtube news publishers between October 2023 and January 2025 were MSNBC with 3.7 billion video views, Fox News with 3.4 billion video views and ANI News with 2.6 billion video views.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

AI-Prescribed Diets Outperform Traditional Plans in Improving Gut Health and Preventing Chronic Diseases

AI's role even in the medical field is proving to be positive. AI prescribed personalized dietary plans have shown better results than traditional dietary plans that were based on one-diet-for-all formula. As per a recent study, these AI prescribed personalized plans have proven to have a positive effect on gut microbiome in humans.

Because traditional dietary plans were based on one-diet-for-all farmula, they were less effective in stopping dietary-related diseases like diabetes, obesity, cancer and heart diseases. The negative result of traditional dietary plans made researchers prefer personalized nutrition plans because of each human's individual response to foods. The emergence of AI made this personalized nutrition plan easier due to AI's ability to successfully prescribe each individual a personalized dietary plan.

To take advantage of AI's ability, food scientists have developed AI chatbots designed specifically to prescribe personalized dietary plans for diabetes and weight loss. These AI models can also help existing health gadgets used to monitor heart rate and pulse rate.

The study, comprising 29 healthy individuals from the Centre for Research and Technology, Greece, was conducted as a part of the PROTEIN project. The participants were asked to use the PROTEIN mobile app and follow dietary plans provided by AI through the app for six weeks to observe changes in macronutrient levels, anthropometric and biochemical traits. The app provided dietary plans to individuals based on their health condition, physical characteristics and food preferences. Then pre-PROTEIN and post-PROTEIN differences were evaluated.

• Also read: From Turing to Transformers: How Artificial Intelligence Surpassed Fiction and Sparked a Global Shift

After studying the samples taken from the participants, results showed the presence of higher microbiota diversity and abundance in the post-PROTEIN levels. There was a significant decrease in the intake of energy, carbohydrates and protein as well as in the intake of sweets and fast food. The decrease in sweet intake positively correlated with body weight and hemoglobin measurements. Also, positive correlation between urea and Lachnospiraceae and negative correlation between cholesterol levels and Oscillibacter were observed.

The changes in gut microbial ecosystem due to AI prescribed dietary plans resulted in less constipation and bowel movement among the participants. Moreover, the dietary plans also supported the immune system positively.

These findings show that AI prescribed dietary plans are more effective due to being specific and limited to individuals. No doubt, more research is required to establish the positive correlation between AI prescribed dietary plans and positive outcomes. But it is now almost certain that AI will have a huge role in the medical field as well in future.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Ehtasham Ahmad via Digital Information World

Instagram Is Working on a New Storylines Feature To Encourage More Interactions

Popular social media platform Instagram is working on an exciting new feature dubbed Storylines that would give rise to more interactions between users.

The latest experiment would entail the Instagram Stories option. As shared by social media expert and app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, users can benefit from collaborative stories that are designed by them and their connections on the app.

Any contact that the user is following will not get the chance to link a new and relatable story to their story, to give rise to a bigger narrative from a certain event. For instance, two users attend a launch event together, and they can add to the original story with content of their own or something relatable. This makes the story bigger from the update at the start.

Such collaborative Stories can be viewed by all connections if they post publicly. In this way, more people are part of the story chain, and that gives rise to bigger and broader multi-perspective narratives. Did we mention a boost in engagement for creators at the same time?

If you don’t publish this publicly, non-followers can still witness that you’ve added some elements to the story, but they cannot view the content. This might motivate more users to connect through the app.

We feel the initiative is a great one to help get more people on board in terms of generating interactions and participation. The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, mentioned how this might be a great focus for the platform in 2025. After all, the manner in which people engage with the Instagram app has really transformed with time. Most of the links and engagement inside the platform come through Stories or Direct Messages.

Therefore, Instagram is working hard to make such elements more powerful to make the most of its strengths and fight off competition from archrivals like TikTok. Now, we might see Instagram as more than just an app for entertainment, like one for connectivity.

We think it might just do the trick, as it worked out well for Blend. The latter is the name given to a combination feed featuring Recommended Reels for the user and their contacts. In such cases, Storylines has potential for bigger grouped Stories that could assist users to link with many others who have common interests.

The features are not in live testing mode right now, and we could never see it launch altogether, but if and when they do, we’ll certainly keep you in the loop about the exciting update.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Attackers Abuse Google’s Security System to Send Fake Emails Featuring Google Account Credentials

Security researchers are raising the alarm against a clever attack carried out by hackers who used a weakness inside Google systems. They managed to roll out a fake email that appeared very real. This email was able to bypass all verifications and hinted at a fake page used to collect logins.

The attacker made the best use of Google’s infrastructure to deceive recipients. It managed to appear so real and even linked it to a support portal that would be hard to distinguish between anything real and fake. It also asked for Google credentials for another step to make it appear so real.

The fake message came from no-reply@google.com and even managed to pass the DKIM method for verification, but in that case, the actual sender was not the same.

The head developer from ENS shared his experience and how he was also sent an email from this fake account. Everything seemed so real, and it appeared like a legitimate security alert from the company.

He was informed about a subpoena asking for his Google Account details. Most users would be easily tricked, especially those who didn’t know where to look for signs of fraud. But Johnson’s eye for detail could see the fake support portal in that email that was hosted across sites.google.com, which is the company’s free web-building platform.

As shared by experts, coming from a Google domain, the chances of being tricked into assuming that something is fake are really high. In this case, the duplicate was as close to the real support portal as one can imagine.

As per the developer, the real intention of the phishing actor was to capture credentials that would compromise the account belonging to the recipient. Fake portals featuring messages that pass the DKIM verification feature of Google are where the trouble lies. They’re known as replay phishing attacks and cannot be identified as others.

Closer looks shared how the mailer's header features another address than Google’s no-reply, and the recipient is me@address in a domain that makes it seem like it originated from Google only.

The message was signed and delivered by the company, and only those with a keen eye for detail didn’t fall into the trap.

Experts did manage to put all the clues they’ve left behind together to figure out how the attack was orchestrated. It included registering domains and producing Google accounts for me@domain. The selection of what comes in the me part for usernames is where the clever part exists, as per the developer.

The attacker would then produce a Google OAuth application and use the name for the whole phishing message. There’s a certain point where the message featured so much whitespace to seem like it ended and to distinguish it from the company’s alerts about getting access to the attacker’s email address.

Once that’s done on Google Workspace, the company rolls out security alerts to the specific inbox. Since Google is in charge of producing emails, it signs them with actual DKIM keys and passes them through all the respective checkpoints. The weakness lies inside Google’s systems, as the DKIM only sees the message and any headers without the envelope. Hence, fake emails bypass signature verification and appear so real inside the inbox of recipients.

Previous incidents where such a technique was used include PayPal, where the system was abused by phishing actors. Fake messages began from the financial firm’s mail servers and bypassed all security checks of DKIM. Here, attackers utilized gift address options to combine new emails with respective PayPal accounts.

For now, Google is working to fix any security loopholes that might exist. This includes the company’s Google OAuth application that’s used by millions.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Search Data Reveals: Meta's Facebook, Twitch, and Likee Experience Major Declines in Popularity

An analysis by Vidpros of 34 platforms revealed notable drops in popularity for several apps since 2021.

The analysis found that a video-sharing app called JOSH lost the most popularity since 2021, with a 71.08% decline. It was somewhat a replacement of TikTok after it was banned in India. There were 31,120 average monthly searches of the app in 2022, with a peak of 48,350 in 2022, but it declined to only 9,000 monthly searches in 2025.

The second app, which saw a huge decrease in its popularity, was Likee, with a decline of 58.96% since 2021. It's owned by a Singaporean tech firm with 409,400 monthly average searches in 2021. In 2025, the average monthly searches of Likee dropped to 168,000 while it had 150 million monthly active users at its peak.

Facebook is the most well-known and popular app, but its popularity has also declined by 42.81% since 2021. In 2021, Meta's Facebook was searched 1,080,600,000 times but the figure dropped to 618,000,000 in 2025. "Facebook’s monthly active users have stayed consistent over the years, but the sharp decline in searches suggests that its demographic is aging and becoming less attractive to younger, newer users who instead use other forms of social media to communicate.", explained Michael Holmes, founder of Vidpros in an email to Digital Information World.

QZone saw a 42.18% decline while Twitch saw a 32.14% decline since 2021. In 2021, QZone was searched 23,260 times a month, while its monthly searches dropped to 13,450 in 2025. On the other hand, Twitch is now being searched 37,200,000 times monthly in 2024, while it was searched 54,820,000 times a month in 2021. The monthly active streamers on Twitch also went from 9.89 million in 2021 to 7.23 million in 2024. There was a 32.06% decline in Facebook Messenger and a 22.90% decline in Discord in popularity. Other top ten apps which have seen a decline in their popularity are Line (16.72%), WeChat (14.68%), and Weibo (12.98%).

Commenting on the findings, Michael Holmes, founder of Vidpros said, "A 2024 Gartner report predicted that by the end of 2025, half of consumers will abandon or significantly limit their interactions with social media. While it’s unclear whether this will be the case yet, what is clear is that there’s been a definite change between what consumers used to want from social media and what they want now." Adding further, "Apps focused on content creation and creativity, such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest, all saw a rise in searches, however, messaging services like WeChat, Messenger, Viber, and Skype, all experienced decreases. This shift from traditional social media uses to more visual apps suggests that users are now prioritizing entertainment over communication."

Methodology: This study ranks social media platforms with at least 100 million active users by their change in global Google searches from 2021 to 2025, utilizing monthly search volume data from Google Keyword Planner.

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From Turing to Transformers: How Artificial Intelligence Surpassed Fiction and Sparked a Global Shift

AI’s riding high these days, yet its blueprint was drawn long before the digital age hit its stride

To create a machine that works and thinks just like humans is a mid 20th-century idea that evolved over decades to reach its present stage. Just like any other machine or product, it has been through its ups and downs before finally bringing a huge change in the technology world. AI is the best example of science fiction becoming a reality.

The computer scientist Alan Turning was the first person to propose the idea of a thinking machine in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence in 1950. His work opened the door of research in AI for other people. In 1956, during the workshop of Dartmouth Summer Research Project, the term Artificial Intelligence was coined by the researchers. This finally made AI an academic field which would be passionately pursued by researchers in the coming years.

After many years of research, a neural network called Perceptron, which could recognize patterns was developed by Frank Rosenblatt in 1957, and a chatbot known as Eliza capable of using natural language processing (NLP) was developed by Joseph Weizenboun at MIT in 1966. In the same year, the first mobile robot, Shakey the Robot, capable of autonomous navigation and decision-making and of using logical reasoning was also developed. This was the first phase of AI, so these systems were simple and could do only limited functions.

The 1970s saw a decline in interest in AI because of its flaws and inability to solve complex problems. In its initial phase, AI was not up to the expectation of people. Thus, the funding for AI research also decreased in that decade significantly.

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More advanced systems gained success in the 1980s. The AI program MYCIN and XCON were designed for practical purposes like the diagnosis of diseases and the configuring of computer systems respectively. Autonomous vehicles using natural language processing were also introduced. These practical usages brought back the importance of AI to the forefront.

Unfortunately, the breakthroughs in the 1980s were still not enough to attract more funding for research and to convince the world. The expectations that the world had from AI were not practical then, and the limited functions AI was performing were too costly. The reasons led to another period of no-research in AI for some years.

Machine learning reached an advanced level in the 1990s when AI models were on data sets. This advancement resulted in the development of Support Vector Machines, Decision Trees like bagging and boosting and Reinforcement Learning. SVMs and techniques like Reinforcement Learning made AI capable of solving complex problems, so the scope of AI in different industries also increased. It was being used for facial recognition, detection of fraud documents and document classification. From there onwards, AI kept on becoming more and more advanced with each passing year.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, many breakthroughs were achieved in deep learning, neural networks and training methods due to better computational power. Deep Belief Networks were developed by Geoffery Hinton in 2006 to train deep neural networks without supervised learning. This showed others the way to enhance deep model learning. The introduction of Transformer Architecture took NLP to the next level by using self-attention mechanisms. These steps led to the creation of language models, like GPT, which could generate accurately human-like content.

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Now LLMs (Large language models) are the base of AI in 2025. These models are trained on large datasets, allowing AI to respond to questions just like a human. LLMs can accurately understand the context and intricacies of the languages, which is why they shocked the world. Another aspect of these LLMs is that they are also creative. Though trained on large datasets, modern AI models, like ChatGPT, Dall-E etc., are able to generate creative text, image and video. Due to the convenience brought by these modern AI models, they are influencing every field of life, from writing to science. This aspect of AI has also worried creative people around the world.

The research is still ongoing in artificial intelligence. Researchers are now trying their best to reach the level of artificial general intelligence. At that level, AI would be able to do tasks that only intellectual humans are able to do, whether in art or science. Some researchers have also coined the term artificial superintelligence for the level beyond AGI. At that level, AI would be able to do those tasks which are still impossible for even humans. This last stage is theoretical, but judging from the evolution of AI over the decades and from what it can do today, it will not be a surprise if AI reaches the levels of AGI and ASI.

When it comes to the future of tech, AI’s calling the shots and running the show. Just like no field or aspect of life could escape the revolution brought by computers in the 1980s and 1990s, no one and nothing will escape the benefits or harms of artificial intelligence.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Ehtasham Ahmad via Digital Information World