Instagram will begin asking users about their birthday

Instagram announced that it will begin displaying a notification asking users to add their birthday to personalize their experience. The company explained that this move is part of Instagram's broader goal of creating new security features for younger users.

According to Instagram, 

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.

Instagram also mentioned that they would know what type of advertiser content to ban based on users age. Furthermore, even though it is possible for users to state a false birthday, the company has developed a system that can tell whether or not user age is fake.

We recognize some people may give us the wrong birthday, and we’re developing new systems to address this. As we shared recently, we’re using artificial intelligence to estimate how old people are 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.