Throughout the last year, Instagram has been working to make its platform safer for younger users and that work appears to involve all users on the platform.
This means that users will have to start sharing their birthday with Instagram so that the platform can implement features designed to keep youngsters safe online.
“This information allows us to create new safety features for young people, and helps ensure we provide the right experiences to the right age group. Recent examples include changes we made in March to prevent adults from sending messages to people under 18 who don’t follow them, and last month we started to default new accounts belonging to people under the age of 16 into a private setting,” explains Instagram.
By knowing a user’s birthday and by extension their age, Instagram can reportedly restrict advertiser targeting options so that say, an alcohol brand can’t advertise to an audience younger than 18 years old.
However, what happens if you ignore Instagram’s prompts to set your birthday?
We have already encountered that exact situation when browsing through Instagram this morning. Quite simply, Instagram will block the content and when you tap to view it, you will be asked for your birthday.
“These screens aren’t new, and we already show them on posts that may be sensitive or graphic, but we don’t currently ask for your birthday when viewing these posts. Now, we’ll start asking for your birthday on some of these screens if you haven’t shared it with us previously,” Instagram said.
As for lying about your birthday, that’s not a good idea. Instagram says that it is “developing new system to address this”. Using AI, Instagram says it can estimate how old a person is based on things like “Happy Birthday” posts.
“In the future, if someone tells us they’re above a certain age, and our technology tells us otherwise, we’ll show them a menu of options to verify their age. This work is still in the early stages, and we look forward to sharing more soon,” the platform said.
We’re curious to see both how Instagram determines a person’s age and how it verifies that age. While generally social media platforms will ask for an ID from your country, we aren’t sure about the legality of this around the world, especially as regards children and teens below the age of 18.
With that having been said, if Instagram is able to execute this verification process, we suspect more platforms might follow suit and implement similar processes.
