Lightning talk on age-verification laws and Wikimedia projects: transcript

Key points

• Governments increasingly propose mandatory age verification for all online platforms to protect children.
• France passed a law for social networks that originally covered all Wikimedia projects, but a carve-out now exists for encyclopedias and educational repositories.
• The UK online safety bill as it stands would require all Wikimedia projects to perform age checks.
• Age checks would make access to free knowledge harder and require more user data to be collected.
• Some content on Commons is problematic from an age-appropriateness view, and some legislators want to see that the community takes the issue seriously.
• A third option is to categorize sensitive content with metadata so parental controls on devices can handle filtering without collecting user data.

Chapters

1. 0:00Governments push mandatory age verification
2. 1:01Why age checks are a problem for Wikimedia
3. 2:34Three ways to restrict age-inappropriate content
4. 3:53Categorizing sensitive content on Commons

Full transcript

0:00And let's welcome Sheila. Sorry? Yep. Thanks. Hi, I'm Dini from Wikimedia Europe and I'm here to share an observation with you. So I work in public policy. I keep an eye on relevant legislative developments in the region of Europe and coordinate Wikimedia's policy and advocacy activities in that regard. and one thing i'm increasingly observing is that governments are more and more trying to tackle the issue of protecting children in the digital world and their standard go-to out-of-the-box solution for that seems to be to propose mandatory age verification for online platforms all online platforms. France recently passed a law that obliges all social networks to do this. In the original draft of this law, all Wikimedia projects would have been included. Thanks to Wikimedia France, there is now a carve-out for online

1:01encyclopedia, educational and scientific repositories. But yeah, that's a carve-out. In the UK, they are currently debating the online safety bill, which as it stands would mandate all Wikimedia projects to perform an age verification check. And these are not the only examples. I'm just quickly giving two. This seems to be a trend across Europe and I'm certain also across the planet. Now, why is this an issue for us? Because, of course, having to perform mandatory age verification checks on each user before they access the service for us would mean A, harder access to free knowledge, an extra obstacle, and B, the Wikimedia Foundation or a third-party service provider would need to collect more data.

1:50data about the users, something we really, really don't want to do. However, if we are honest, on Commons there is quite some content that probably deserves more attention and is problematic from the point of view of, well, let's say at least age-appropriate content regulation, and we don't seem to be doing all that much against it or about it. I'm not saying that we should perform age verification, I'm lobbying against it, at least for Wikimedia projects, but I think we need to be serious about the issue because some legislators are actually quite okay.

2:34They say, look, we will not come after you with this, but we want to see that you're being serious about this issue and that you're really paying attention to it. The Wikimedia Foundation is doing a child rights impact assessment, which is great. But I think we might also, as a community, consider doing a little bit more. Now, from what I have read and seen, there are three ways to do this age-appropriate content restriction online. One is to check your user's age on your platform, which we don't want because the Wikimedia Foundation would have to collect more data about the users.

3:10The second way to do this would be to outsource this to a third party. So let's say to allow only people with a Apple ID or Facebook ID or Google ID join the platform. But, of course, we don't want to do this. But I think there is actually a third way. I know this is not popular, but I still want us to think about this and to consider it. If the content comes with the appropriate metadata, that this is sensitive content or inappropriate content, Then a device on the side of the user can, through its parental controls, actually take care of these settings without any additional data about the user being exchanged.

3:53This is a bit like cable TV and your set-top boxes work. Of course, right now, and I don't think Wikimedia would ever offer this out of the box or, you know, provide such a service. I'm not arguing for this. But on Commons, there are a few categories that actually already go down this line. So, there is a category on Commons called Files with Child Protection and Obscenity Acts Warnings, which basically categorizes 200 or so files that have some pretty rough sexual content in them.

4:24And I want us to consider whether we as a community wouldn't want to make more of a concerted effort to categorize more of the sensitive content or controversial content on comments in such categories, because that would essentially allow anybody with a parental control function on the device side to make use of this without us having to gather any data. so yeah give power to the parents a bit thank you and I know it's it's a tricky and uncomfortable issue but I think we need to think about it so thanks how was the lightning show so far

Source and licence

Recording: File:Wikimania 2023 - Plenary - 18 August - Lightning Talk - Age-Verification on Wikimedia Projects.webm by Wikimania 2023 (2023-08-18), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.