Bans on Under 16s Social Media
I am a UK user of pretty much the whole WPMN ecosystem, and my use case for these products means that I am directly affected by the upcoming social media ban on users under 16.
I'm sure I am not the only one who will be affected by this, especially because these bans (both in the UK and Australia) put the responsibility on the platform to make sure that children are unable to make an account, so I thought I would give a rundown of the issues and also what we could possibly do to make FluentCommunity in particular more protected against compliance issues.
Please do comment with your own thoughts and use cases! I'd love to build up a bigger picture of how we can make the platform better for users around the world, especially in light of how amazing Shahjahan Jewel and his teams were when it came to responding to the new EU withdrawal rules.
My use case
First of all, it might be useful for you to understand a little about how I actually use FluentCommunity, so that you understand how this affects me.
I am a teacher of English, History, Media Studies and Film Studies, but my ultimate aim is to switch to a more flexible working setup. I want to be able to provide group classes and asynchronous courses to as many students between the ages of 13 and 19 as possible.
The WPMN has given me almost everything I need to be able to start on this journey, to be honest!
I use spaces as subjects in school and then separate them into space groups for different school levels. Namely, I tailor to A-level and IBDP students, who are between the ages of 16 and 19, but I also have spaces for GCSE and IBMYP students (14-16), and I would like to do transitionary courses to help students prepare for each level.
That does mean that the sidebar can get quite long and unwieldy for me and I would love to be able to personalise that for each type of user and have the opportunity to filter the spaces in the dedicated page a little more, but that's for another time.
I use FluentCart to make course payments, CRM to manage mailing lists, and offer tutoring sessions through FluentBooking. The point is that because of my ADHD, I want to automate as much of the administration as possible so that I only have to worry about actually delivering the teaching and communicating with the students in the community.
This, of course, means that when the new rules come into effect next year, I will have a few options as FluentCommunity currently stands:
- Make the community 16+ only, and potentially miss out on a lot of revenue that will mean I can't really meet my goals – the total pool of reachable students would go from 2.1 million worldwide (if you combine all the different kinds of exam boards) to about 500,000 worldwide. This would also mean I'd need to find a way to verify ages, which would slow down the process of signups and drop my income significantly.
- Strip all things from the community that make it more like a social media platform, removing lots of the automation and incentives for people to stick around.
- Change to a different model completely.
That would be a real shame, because FluentCommunity is pretty much almost there as it is! With a few tweaks, FluentCommunity could probably very easily be exempt from the rules – provided that the primary purpose of the community you're setting up is educational or has a specific non-social goal like playing a particular video game or something.
So let's look into it.
How close to compliance is FluentCommunity right now?
To be honest, things aren't as far off as I originally thought! Here are some of the positives of the current setup that can help with exemption:
- The feed is not sorted by a complex algorithm that encourages you to stick around and promotes addictiveness. Instead, it's activity-based with some manual elements to it, like pinning, which means that space owners (in my case, teachers) and moderators can curate the experience to be as educational or useful for the primary purpose as possible.
- You can disable more addictive elements, such as the Leaderboards, which means quick options for compliance.
- It is possible to gate elements of the community to allow them to be usable only by certain members. For example, I don't offer social spaces to younger users.
- The notifications are not personalised to the degree of addiction. They are space-based, and the following function doesn't curate your feed.
- Moderation is useful. It means that you can ensure each space is going to be scrutinised and curated by the moderators/admins and that bad content is going to be left out.
Are there any problems currently posed by FluentCommunity for compliance?
- Members are identified by their full names and do not have the choice to be more anonymous. This is an issue, since with young people, we want to avoid them being identifiable by potentially bad actors.
- The leaderboard is based on engagement, which does align it with more addictive social media tendencies. We want to avoid things that reward people for posting because it mirrors social media too much. Improvements to the leaderboard to allow us to choose what kinds of interactions and behaviour grant points would prevent this.
- Moderation is trapped behind settings, rather than having an obvious place in the main section. It would be better if there were an obvious, visible moderation alert for people somewhere more out in the open.
- The leaderboard doesn't really do anything other than provide dopamine for users. Its sole purpose is engagement rather than rewarding community members for good contributions.
- You can't create different profile types with different levels of access. Ideally, to improve our compliance, we'd be able to have different kinds of users, some of whom can message anyone while others can't, changing which space groups they can see, etc.
- You can't edit what gets flagged for moderation and (as far as I'm aware) people don't get sent 'warning messages' or whatever when their messages get flagged too many times. Plus, we don't have a way to track how many times their posts were deleted.
- We can't moderate the private messages.
I'm going to put suggestions on how to improve in the comments underneath. Please add your own!
Some of the things that would help are:
- The creation of profile types with different permission levels for access.
- Improvements to the moderation features to include moderation of messages and clearer 'consequences' for someone who is a repeat offender.
- Somewhere clear that people can refer to the community rules, that is built into the FluentAuth signup process so people can click to say they've read and they understand the rules for each community.
- The ability to make leaderboards more about course completion, good posts chosen by moderators, etc.
- The ability to make some posts within a space private even if the space itself is public and vice versa.
- The ability to download all GDPR data about you from your profile.
- Building the Affiliate and Bookings sections into the FluentCart account page so that we can more easily manage different types of users and arrange things like bookings to check identity/age verifications.
- Custom sign-up fields that more easily track onto profile types.
- Granular private message permissions, so that certain profile types can only message and be messaged by admins and moderators while others can message or be messaged by anyone with the same permission as them.
- An area for any space specific rules to be clear within the space, maybe in a dedicated tab.
- An area in the 'members' page where you list all the admins and moderators so the people responsible for community safety are clearly visible and approachable. Maybe the same for spaces, too. That way, the person responsible for safety is approachable and recognisable.
- The ability to have different kinds of sidebar menus for different access levels.
- The ability to choose whether a user's profile is viewable or not.
- The ability to be listed by display name only, not by first name and surname.
Possibly also a way to restrict user joining based on the DOB they input during registration?
Shani Cipro I'd also like to find this option, but not to configure the verification since it's easy to bypass that by entering any date without further verification (proof). (But for birthdays, it would be great).
I'm in the UK and was also wondering about this - I think defining what is a social network is important in this context, offering education/service communication rather than engagement/retention might be okay, but having access to a Space where they can talk to other people will not be allowed. For me, the Registration process is likely the biggest headache, but there are lots of other things to consider.
The new laws are also not just under 16s, it will affect anyone under 18.
The UK government is implementing significant changes to social media regulations aimed at protecting children. These rules will ban social media access for children under 16 and introduce additional restrictions for those under 18.
Effective Date: Spring 2027
Who is Affected: Children under 16 will be prohibited from using social media platforms.
Restrictions will also apply for Ages 16-17.
Features Restricted: Live streaming and Communication with strangers.
In Australia it's a only the huge social media platforms that have a ban... nothing else.
Scott Hopkins That explains why they're saying that the UK one is Australia Plus!
It is the big networks. Lets not give them any ideas to require this of small independent platforms.
James Robinson The thing is, they've made it pretty clear they're going beyond the Australian model and finding ways to ban young people from more than just social media spaces. They're also not completely sure how they're going to handle this at the moment. There are differences between the ages listed within different documents on gov.uk and they have already said they're targeting even messaging functions within online games
Well-written post. Good points, clearly communicated.
I think you' might be able to do some of what you need using the User Role Editor Pro plugin ($29/yr). If you use a membership plugin, it might also be able to restrict content types based on roles.
Regarding privacy of user's real names: I've been asking for the option to show only display names or nicknames for a long time. This seems like such a basic and necessary function for FluentCommunity; I don't understand why it hasn't been implemented before this.
Question: How does Great Britain expect us to verify the ages of our users? My sites are for adult users and it says so in the Terms of Service. Is that not enough? And, if not, would something like Stripe's verification service work?
Melynda thank you! Would it allow me to add restrictions to things that are usually just either on or off? Like messaging?
The new bill is pitched as “Australia +” which says that site owners need to take reasonable steps to ensure that people under 16 aren’t signing up! So it needs to be more than just a trust system!
Shani Cipro The plugin, "Better Messaging" has a FluentCommunity integration, according to its Wordpress plugin repository page. The listing also says the free version supports role-based access.
Its docs say it adds message buttons to FluentCommunity profiles, uses FluentCommunity avatars/profile links, integrates with spaces and courses, and should be used instead of Fluent Messaging when installed.
It has role-based messaging controls: allow/deny rules, restrictions on starting conversations, reply restrictions, visibility restrictions (as well as per-role rate limits, which you might be able to set to zero--I'm unsure.)
It reads custom WordPress roles you've created, too.
I'm not sure about how Better Messaging replaces messaging within Fluent Community, but since there's an integration, maybe things will run smooth? It's worth a look.
IF you're able to give your users a role base upon their ages, that plugin might work for you.
Hope that helps!
Shani Cipro In addition to the above solution, here are some other ideas:
If you don't mind dinking around with FluentCommunity's code, the "User Role Editor Pro" plugin allows you to add a shortcode to your code like this:
[user_role_editor roles="role1, role2"] some restricted content [/user_role_editor]
That should completely hide whatever you want to hide from users of a given role.
The trade-off there is that you'd have to make that change again every time you updated FluentCommunity. To make it easier, you could use the "Search and Replace" plugin to redo each time. Or maybe you could make a code snippet that would take care of it, so that you wouldn't have to worry about it at all when FC is updated.
Another solution is that you could hide things (messaging, etc) from all users, regardless of their role, using CSS. That would be simpler--and not break whenever FC is updated!--as long as what you want to hide has a CSS class name.
There are probably other solutions I've not thought of (and perhaps what I've written above is drivel; I have a crashing headache, and it's almost 1AM my time. 🤣 ).
Shani Cipro Oh, me too! Ross's menu plugin is the one I'm looking forward to the most right now.
Shani Cipro I forgot to mention in my first response to you above that Ross has a plugin that you can use to show users' display names, nicknames, first name only, last name only, or any other user meta field (instead of their usernames or first and last names). It works well on my site.