Instagram To Ask For New Users' Birthday To Reinforce Its Age Rules

In a blog post made public recently, Instagram announced that it would reinforce the age gates. The platform has long been restricted users under 13 years old. However, it was not until today that it had a way to check if the person registering is lying about his or her age.

According to the blog post, asking for users’ birthday is the way to keep young people safe on the site as well as enabling Instagram to provide age-appropriate experience for its users.

Those who sign up for Instagram with their Facebook account will see their birthday updated automatically, but fear not, this information will not be public.

In another statement, the company said that its target was to prevent any tweenager from joining Instagram. However, it said nothing on whether its number of new users will decrease as a result of this change.

A spokesperson of the site said that in order for the site to keep users safe, it needed to know how old they are. The young community of users needs special content curated just for them. This extra step of requiring new users’ birthdays will help to reinforce Instagram’s rule of no user under 13 years old are allowed to join the platform.

Instagram is quite late to roll out this method to check ages. Snapchat has done the same thing long ago, along with some of its other competitors.

According to COPPA, or Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law of the United States, the information and privacy of children under 13 years old must be protected online.

This year has seen TikTok getting a fine of a hefty amount of $5.7 million for violating COPPA. In answer to this, the short video-sharing site now requires users to enter their birthday when signing up too.