Starting Sept. 30, alcohol companies are going to have to verify that users visiting their pages on social networks are of legal drinking age. The new regulations are designed to prevent marketing their products to kids. Alcohol makers are required to monitor their fan pages for inappropriate content and to promote responsible drinking. The regulations also require privacy policies that ensure protections for data collection and use of personal information, clearly identifying brand marketing and product promotions in media-like blogs, and instructions encouraging people only to forward promotions to adults who are older than 21 years old.

“What you have is distilled alcohol brands stepping up and saying, ‘We want to do things in a socially responsible way when it comes to advertising alcohol,’” says Hemanshu Nigam, chief executive of online safety and privacy firm SSP Blue. Mr. Nigam works as a digital marketing advisor to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS), which developed the new guidelines in coordination with the European Forum for Responsible Drinking.

The WSJ reports that: “Bacardi rum, for instance, already lists a series of “house rules” on its Facebook page. The company says that it can moderate videos and photos before they are published on the alcohol-brand’s page and says that content published on its site must not appeal to or depict people younger than the legal age purchasing alcohol, show situations where alcohol is being consumed “excessively or in an irresponsible manner” or show people “in a state of intoxication,” among other restrictions.

Already, beverage alcohol marketers must restrict their advertising to media where at least 71.6% of the audience is expected to be old enough to buy alcohol legally. August data from Nielsen show that more than 80% of the audiences at Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were older than 21, the legal drinking age in the U.S.

For the past several years, alcohol marketers have used age gates on their brand websites, requiring consumers to enter their birth date to prevent minors from accessing the sites. The industry is trying to keep pace with new technologies as marketers increasingly use social media to pitch their products.”