Instagram, a popular social media platform owned by Meta, announced that it is testing new ways of age verification for its users.
Age verification is the need of this social media platform because many people don’t add their true age on the platform, the reason might be any, from they don’t really know their age to they want to hide their true age even from the social media giant. Not only the platform, but people also want to know their age if they don’t know their true age somehow or they want to just verify how old they appear.
Age verification by selfies
The first new method introduced by Instagram is based on video selfies. Users can upload their videos on the platform for age verification and within minutes know their age. This uploaded video will be shared with Yoti, a company that has this technology of age verification.
After around 20 minutes Instagram tells your age.
Last year Instagram paused the launch of its Instagram Kids platform because of criticism from people. This new age verification method may open a new way for making Instagram, kids friendly, teens friendly, and adults friendly.
Age verification by social vouching
The second method is social vouching. It is for you if you don’t want to believe in a machine. In this method, you have to ask three mutual followers to confirm how old you are. The vouching person must be at least 18 years old and respond within 3 days. You simply ask three people to vouch for you and they need to respond to your request within 3 days.
Instagram can use this age verification for providing an age-based environment for its users. For example- Instagram can make 13-17 year old users’ profiles private by default and can limit their contact with unknown people. Instagram can limit the reach of advertisers also to these immature users.
Instagram’s AI can also affect the reach of posts based on the age of the audience. This can be really useful for people because people are only seeing posts related to them based on their age. For example- If a post is providing information that is important for people of only an age group then this post may not appear much for other people of different age groups.
Conclusion-
Internet users are growing rapidly and online businesses are also growing rapidly. So, a huge amount of content is getting generated every hour, if Instagram fails to provide related content to its users then users will leave rapidly because there is no shortage of social media platforms on the internet nowadays. Instagram will have to provide only valuable content for users out of this huge content generated very rapidly. This is actually the reason that Instagram is working on its methods to verify users’ data, hence, they can be targeted easily for the related content to them.
