An alcohol age gate must enforce 21, not 18
The requirementstatement
Where the restricted content is alcohol, the age gate must enforce a 21+ threshold rather than 18+.
- 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
- age-gate threshold
- Where it liveslayer
- WebsiteWEBSITE
- How Ekas settles itdetectability
- AI · crawlCRAWL
- Needs your live site or policy page fetched and read. Ekas crawls it the way a reviewer would.
- 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
- TwilioCTIA
- When it appliesapplicabilityText
- Applies to every 10DLC registration.
Why this rule existsrationale
Twenty-one is the US drinking age, so an 18+ gate admits a whole cohort the rule exists to exclude and does it while looking compliant. The mistake travels with software: templates and plugins ship with 18 as the default because that is the threshold most of the world uses, and nobody changes it.
How to fix itremediation
Set the gate's minimum age to 21 wherever alcohol content is served, and check the plugin default rather than assuming it. Done when entering a date of birth for a twenty-year-old is refused.
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 | Yes |
Notesnotes
Conditional on alcohol content being present, carried in the criteria rather than as a tag — there is no alcohol attribute on the registration, and the declared ageGated flag says nothing about which substance is behind the gate.
Rules you will hit next
Other website rules at the same severity. A registration is judged as a whole, not rule by rule.
WEB-001A brand website URL is requiredBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-009The website must resolve and return contentBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-012A parked or for-sale domain is not a websiteBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-013A pre-launch placeholder is not a websiteBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-014Staging, admin and internal hosts must not be the brand websiteBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-016The website must be machine-crawlableBlockingBLOCKING
WEB-112 is one of 93 website rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.