Alcohol content requires robust age gating

The requirementstatement

Campaign content must not promote alcohol sales or promotion.

Severityseverity: BlockingBLOCKINGBreaking this rule gets the submission rejected. There is no partial credit.
When it bitesphase: Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
What is checkedobject: campaign.description + campaign.sample[] + campaign.message_flow
Where it liveslayer: Message contentMESSAGE_CONTENT
How Ekas settles itdetectability: AI · formAI_FORM; A semantic question about what you wrote: whether a description matches a use case, whether a name looks like a filed entity. Judged by a model against written criteria.
What the fix involvesfailureClass: Fix the websiteTERMINAL_WEBSITE; The fix lives on your site. No amount of rewording the form clears it.
Who requires itauthorities: TwilioTCRT-MobileAT&TCTIA
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

The A in SHAFT, and the letter that genuinely has a path. Alcohol sits in a contested band: Bandwidth, Bird and Telnyx accept it behind a date-of-birth age gate, Twilio kills the rejected campaign but takes a new one once the gate exists. Because the strictest authority treats the submitted campaign as terminal we surface it as blocking, but the fix is real, and telling an operator otherwise costs them a legitimate programme.

How to fix itremediation

Build a 21+ age gate that collects a full date of birth — day, month and year typed in, not a yes/no prompt and not a tick-box — on the opt-in flow and on every website a message links to, then set the age-gated attribute on the campaign. Done when a visitor who enters an under-21 date is refused and cannot proceed by going back. Expect to file a NEW campaign rather than edit this one: Twilio treats the rejected campaign as spent even though it advises building exactly this gate.

Common mistakespitfalls

A gate that only appears on the home page does not settle it — the requirement runs to every linked destination, and reviewers test the deep link from the sample message rather than the site root.
Age gating answers who may see the offer and nothing about what the offer says: copy that sells drinking to excess is judged separately by MSG-177 and the gate does not touch it.

Provider rejection codescodes

The code you get back when this rule is what failed, and whether that provider lets you resubmit.

Provider	Code	Resubmit
Twiliogen2	30955	No
Twiliogen2	30956	No
Bandwidth	706	Yes
Telnyx	706	Yes
Bird	706	Yes

Notesnotes

Providers genuinely diverge, and the divergence is in the remediability rather than the prohibition: Twilio 30955/30956 are non-resubmittable for the rejected campaign while Bandwidth DCA2 706, Telnyx 706 and Bird 706 all accept a resubmission once a DOB gate exists, and Twilio toll-free 30456 is conditional on 21+ with full date-of-birth collection. Strictest reading kept for the verdict, the workable path kept in the remediation.

Rules you will hit next

6 other rules read campaign.description + campaign.sample[] + campaign.message_flow. Fixing one field to satisfy a single rule is how a resubmission trades one rejection for another, so read these before you change anything.

MSG-137No unsolicited bulk messagingBlockingBLOCKING MSG-161SHAFT screening covers every campaign field, not a sample of themBlockingBLOCKING MSG-164No underage, non-consensual or illegal sexual themesBlockingBLOCKING MSG-170No content promoting, glorifying or inciting violenceBlockingBLOCKING MSG-182No explosives, fireworks or pyrotechnics contentBlockingBLOCKING MSG-183No weapons that are not legal in all fifty statesBlockingBLOCKING

All message content rules

MSG-SHAFT-ALCOHOL is one of 122 message content rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.