Don’t Want Underage Followers? There’s An App For That

Imagine you’re a wine company and you’re on Twitter. You may feel an eensy bit uncomfortable tweeting about your newest offering’s full-bodied taste and encouraging followers to try it when your followers may be underage – significantly underage. Well, consider this service your childproof gate. No, really. It’s called Twitter “Gate.”

Age validation is nothing new, of course – it’s pretty customary on most sites these days. If you’re not over 18 (or in some instances, like social platforms, 13) you can’t participate, purchase, play, etc. What IS new though is adding an extra layer for the brand to contact the potential follower via direct message (DM), ask whatever qualifying questions it wants and having the responses automatically determine whether the brand will allow or deny follow access. We may have stumbled upon a useful way to use DMs! (TrueTwit users take note.)

But what happens if a potential follower lies about his age? We asked just that and John Nolt, Director of Product Management at Vitrue answered, “While Vitrue’s Twitter “Gate” functionality is designed to allow brands to ensure that promotions, interactions and engagements are with age-appropriate audiences, it does put trust in the users to be honest about their actual date of birth, simliar to the birthdate validation process used on the websites of most beer, wine and spirits brands.”

Trust the users?! Oh well, I guess short of a retinal scan or some other sci-fi solution I was hoping they’d reveal, trust will just have to do for now. I’m guessing that being questioned will scare most of the kiddies away. But if any users of this service need help formulating scary questions to weed out the young’uns, I’m your gal.

So, what do you think? Would you like to see this service available for your own Twitter stream?

(Photo of girls peeking through gate from Shutterstock)