Minors and online regulationCopy wiki link

This is the entry point for the wiki’s work on minors and online regulation. The region covers four kinds of intervention — identify the user, constrain what platforms may build, teach the reader, and detect abusive material — together with the evidence and legal instruments behind each.

The interventions are not interchangeable, and the sections below are organized by which one a note examines rather than by which harm it invokes. Alternatives to age verification is the note that compares them, matching intervention to harm mechanism and setting out when an age threshold is the indispensable step.

Identifying the userCopy wiki link

• Age assurance defines the family of techniques and separates verification, estimation, and inference.
• EU age verification and Internet privacy traces the EU proof-of-age layer and what it means for anonymous access.
• Assessing age assurance technologies compares architectures on effectiveness, side effects, and acceptance.
• X-rated compliance theater records how deployed European systems performed under low-cost attack.
• Age-proof unlinkability and account uniqueness sets out the tension between unlinkable proofs and one-person-one-account rules.
• Age-verification circumvention services and Displacement cover the workaround economy and where blocked demand goes.

Constraining platform designCopy wiki link

• Less harmful social media works through the compulsive-design, recommendation, contact, and commercial mechanisms that can be changed without classifying the user.
• DSA protection of minors guidelines is the EU risk taxonomy the design analysis builds on.
• UK Online Safety Act is the statute driving current enforcement, with Ofcom as its regulator.
• Australian under-16 social media ban, French social media ban for under-15s, and the UK Online Safety Act’s under-16 ban are the national age-threshold regimes the wiki tracks.

Pornography and adolescentsCopy wiki link

• Pornography literacy and harm reduction separates the harms attributed to pornography and weighs literacy, production reform, and blocking against each.
• Better pornography production treats production conditions and depicted conduct as a lever distinct from access control.

Detecting abuse materialCopy wiki link

• Automated CSAM detection describes the detection stack and the reporting pipeline it feeds.
• CSAM scanning externalizes error costs follows what a false flag does to the person on the receiving end.
• Client-side scanning covers the architecture proposed for end-to-end encrypted services.
• NCMEC CyberTipline is the US reporting clearinghouse that pipeline runs through.
• EU private communications law tracks the CSA-regulation debate that would mandate detection in the EU.

Open questionsCopy wiki link

The domain’s research frontier:

• Does age verification reduce harms other measures cannot
• Do under-16 social-media bans reduce measured harm
• Which social-media designs reduce harm for young users
• Does pornography use cause adolescent sexual aggression
• Does pornography literacy improve adolescent outcomes
• Does better pornography production improve viewer outcomes
• What is the production false-positive rate of automated CSAM detection
• Does online displacement behave like crime displacement

Graphs § Child safety cluster shows the same region as a relational map.

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