NY state has proposed bills that would require social media platforms to make profiles private for those who are not verified as being age 18+, and also make it impossible to tag or message them without having a friend request approved.
Viewing profiles is important for curators looking to determine whether a user has a pattern of problematic behavior, and for finding and removing additional problematic content once it is established that the user is making problematic content.
And without being able to tag or message the user, warnings would be impossible and curators would have no option but suspension, which as the site is currently structured would also be impossible since the suspend button is on the profile page, as is the moderation history.
I don’t know a lot about how things run on the staff side of things, and it is hard to find all the details of these bills since they are still in progress and many news outlets now are paywalled, but I wanted to bring attention to the potential for an issue here. I want to make sure that iNat staff are aware of this so we are not caught by surprise with a flood of unsuspendable trolls if this or similar passes.
I think there’s probably a couple of caveats here for lawyers to sort out, and this is just proposed legislation, which often isn’t passed or passed in highly modified form. So I wouldn’t worry too much at this point. The key point is whether iNat would meet the definition of platforms covered by the act (“any public or “semi-public” platform used by minors aimed at letting users create profiles, post content, and interact with others”) which is very broad, so I guess it would.
That said, I imagine, that, if the proposed legislation were to pass, it could effectively prevent minors in NY state from participating on iNat. It effectively breaks the community of iNat to have profiles not viewable or users mentionable in posts. Younger users often need more help from the community in getting acclimated to iNat, and I can’t imagine any school project on iNat working with the proposed restrictions (either for the teacher or the moderation issues).
More broadly, legislation like this seems to require platforms to do age checks of all participants and know where they are located, which iNat doesn’t currently do. So the requirements could force platforms to either implement those methods or just say “users under X in location Y are not permitted.”
I would guess that more similar proposed bills will be put forward in other jurisdictions, so it’s probably not something that will go away.
my understanding of all these sorts of bills is that they’re just Trojean Horses to allow social media companies to identify users, under the guise of child protection.
there’s similar legislation being pushed (and passed) all around the world. i’d be surprised if iNat isn’t already aware of this sort of thing and looking into it, since Australia passed something similar last year, and Australia is one of the more active iNat communities.
I’ll note that the Australian legislation, which is 16+, explicitly prohibits companies from compelling users to provide govt issued ID to prove their age. They must offer reasonable alternatives and the data used to age verify must be destroyed immediately upon completing verification (or failing to complete). A lot of the offerings for verification never leave your computer and all the processing is done on your computer.
The companies can be fined up to $50million for compelling people to hand over their govt ID, and then if they keep and use that ID, it can be up to 10% of their annual turnover. The question is whether any fines would be enforced.
my biggest concern with these age check laws is the vulnerability of private data. this method is one is a better attempt to protect that. though I don’t quite know what forms this could take since the technical details are sparse and I’m sure that there could be law-abiding ways that are still terrible.
As for the NY legislation, nothing I see here appears as though it would affect moderation activities. Which you could say that curators here effectively do.
I see other problems with it - namely that it’s overly vague about the age check mechanism and seems to allow business to use services that DO store that data and ostensibly sell it to data brokers who then might use it to connect all the data obtained about you online. Not to mention the technical problems that various social platforms will have implementing these requirements. With the hodgepodge of laws around the world, this is going to put a strong damper on innovation on the internet, as it will be a significant challenge and expense for new websites to implement.
These laws are going to effectively stifle legal adult communication online. small websites that can’t handle the variety of age check requirements and other technical issues simply won’t allow social activity.