Twitter Forces Users To Verify Birthdates Before Viewing Sensitive Content

In a bid to help increase its efforts to filter underage users viewing sensitive content on its app, Twitter is making sure your birthday is verified.

The platform mentioned recently that it’s doing everything in its power to ramp up the crackdown against people that are below the age of 18 but yet manage to view inappropriate content. Therefore, we should soon see the new feature rolling out that restricts tweets it calls sensitive.

The only exception is cases where a birthdate happens to be attached to the user’s account and they are above the age of 18. The news comes as quite a few users began noticing how they were being requested to add their birthdates if they wished to see a particular type of content.

This move is a part of the app’s better safety efforts and that’s why it’s calling it as an important rollout that’s a long time coming.

In the public post announced today, Twitter says they’re constantly evolving with time to give more and more people more choices and better control of what they’re seeing. The goal is to ensure the platform is safe for all, it explained.

For now, the app is not very clear on if the rollout would be global or restricted to several countries. But we do know it’s a crackdown against those who fail to add their birthdates on their profile.

But some feel it’s an invasion of their privacy. Moreover, they concluded how such decisions could be used for other practices like targeted ads.
It’s a known fact that people below the age of 13 on the app arise because they lie about their age when joining the platform. So if the app is asking some people to verify their age for the sake of content filtering then we feel it’s justified.

A new report by the UK shed light on the great extent of lies that children use to appear they are age-appropriate when joining leading platforms. You’d probably never be able to guess through their social media profiles that they're so young, the report concluded.

For now, the app’s content policy for sensitive topics is very diverse and there is a range of categories that come under it. For instance, you’ve got violence, gore, hate, adult, and much more. And it’s interesting to note that while the app isn’t issuing a ban on adult content, it does mark it as sensitive and wants to make sure the people viewing it are the right age.

In the same way, the app does not like to post adult content on headers and profile pictures or live streams. Moreover, for a while now, we see the social network struggles with combatting abusive material on the app. While it does ban accounts that do so as it's a breach of the company’s contract, you can’t help but imagine how the cases are thousands, and keeping tabs on them is not simple.

This particular update seems to arise from the fact that a new report launched in August accused the firm of failing to eradicate explicit content linked to child abuse. Moreover, it strongly mentioned how the app wished to monetize through adult content via the OnlyFans competitor but after this news, the plans of the project went down the drain.

With this news, we feel the app is trying its best to get into the good books of many people, especially lawmakers present around the globe.

Be it the UK or the US, there are plenty of watchdogs waiting for leading social media apps to make mistakes so they can be fined for such behavior and the most trending topic of them all is child abuse.


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