Twitter trying to keep the kids and booze apart — with voluntary age-screening

Yeah, that’ll totally work.

Starting today, Twitter is starting an age-screening process for people who want to follow alcohol brands. You enter your date of birth, Twitter does a little counting on its fingers and compares to the legal drinking age of the country you say you’re from, and if it all checks out, Twitter will let you follow the account.

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Because, of course, no-one lies online.

“Our hope is that this approach to age-screening will enable alcohol brands to responsibly and safely connect with the right audience on Twitter,” Twitter’s Tarun Jain posted today on the Twitter blog.

While this age-screening is fairly easy to fool, Twitter may eventually get a little bit more hard-core, as you can see if you read the fine print that you must agree to when verifying that you are not a prepubescent boy:

In order to perform this function we may use third-party service providers to collect your information, including your birthdate; however, such service providers can only use your information to the extent necessary for them to provide this service pursuant to our instructions, and only subject to obligations mirroring the protections of our privacy policy located at http://twitter.com/privacy.

In other words, Twitter could start trying to verify that you are of legal age through third-party companies at some point, although they’re not specified, and neither are any potential methods.

One other thing you’re agreeing to when you verify your age with Twitter: data donation:

We may also share aggregate or anonymous age data with third parties for marketing purposes in accordance with our privacy policy. For example, we may identify the number of users within an age range that follow a specific account or types of accounts. By submitting your age information you agree to the sharing of your information as described above.

The age verification is available now. Twitter says that advertisers such as Bud Light, Jim Beam, Knob Creek, Heineken, and Bacardi are integrating the feature into their Twitter ad campaigns.