Up till now social networking platform Instagram was careless about its users’ ages. However, after nine years since inception, the company is now becoming more responsible to protect underage users from risks and problems associated with social media. 

According to reports, the company from now will be asking new users to input their birth date, and will be stopping users under the age of 13 to join the platform. To make a note, this new change won’t be affecting existing users, regardless of their age. 

With this, Instagram will begin using age info for educating its users about setting and privacy control. The company is also adding a feature that enables users to only receive messages, stories replies from followers. However, Instagram will be keeping people’s birthdays private which is synced with their linked Facebook profile.  

While justifying the change, the company said that asking age info would help them restrict underage people from joining Instagram. This would enable them to keep younger users safe and offer more age-appropriate content. 

Instagram took a long time to add this feature. Speaking on which, a company spokesperson said that Instagram didn’t require users to specify age earlier as it is a platform where anyone can express themselves, irrespective of their identity. 

Meanwhile, other popular social network sites like TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook are already asking users to input their date of birth while signing up. For the record, TikTok was fined $5.7 million by FTC for violating COPPA. Following this, TikTok developed a whole separate section on its application where underage users can watch videos but cannot comment or post. 

Adding the age check feature is the first decent step by Instagram. However, it is necessary for the company to take proactive steps to do more to verify its user’s age.

Source Link - https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/04/instagram-age-verification/