Compliance with new Social Media Regulations (Age Restriction)
I'm facing a specific challenge in Portugal. A new law is about to be approved that prohibits social media access for minors under 16. Since I am building a platform for students, this is a major compliance hurdle.
To the developers: How can we implement a robust Verification System within Fluent Community to address this? Specifically:
Can we integrate an ID/Documentation upload feature for age verification during registration?
Is there a way to restrict access to certain community features based on verified age to ensure we follow these legal requirements?
Trust and safety are now a legal priority for us. Looking forward to your insights on how to handle this age-gate!
What is the legal definition of social media? I see a difference between Instagram and a discussion space, but I didn't write the law. I imagine the school and university campuses have student discussion areas.
William Beem good question! Need to check-in that further
William Beem According to the bill presented (which has broad consensus between the main parties, PSD and PS), the target is not just platforms like Instagram or TikTok. The law applies to:
Social media platforms: Where there is profile creation and public interaction.
Image and video sharing services.
Open communication services: Where users can interact with each other.
Platforms featuring 'infinite scroll' or recommendation algorithms."
Andre Gois It sounds like an overly broad description. FluentCommunity is not an infinite scroll or a recommended algorithm platform. but we do have profiles and 'public' interaction. Image and video sharing isn't in play the way I read it, as people aren't uploading user generated content.
My next question is whether any or all of these criteria apply to what is or isn't social media.
In any event. the base minimum you can do is specify a minimum age in your Terms of Service and have proof of acceptance.
I'd ask if a private membership constitutes public interaction.
I have a client that probably needs this too.
How are they making you implement it? Some of the things around age verification I've seen is bonkers, just today saw someone trick the roblox one with a face drawn on their thumb...
Do you just need a "verify your age" gate like over 18 sites have now? Just a date field or "yes I'm over 18". Or is every single site owner expected to integrate complex age verification checks, or hold users identity documents somehow... sounds messy.
Sounds like the early days of cookie law, where the intention was to stop nefarious tracking of users and they somehow forgot most cookies are legitimate use that sites require to function. Something that was just meant to stop dodgy companies pushing cookies on you ultimately hurt every single website experience and still does to this day. Those putting these things into law really don't understand how these things work at the ground level, or the expectations they put on simple site owners with their broad policies.
Ross FCA In Portugal, the law is still being finalized, but the trend is moving away from simple 'Yes, I am 18' checkboxes (which everyone knows don't work) towards 'effective verification.'
There is a push for integration with government-backed systems like the Digital Mobile Key, which uses official ID data to verify age without the site owner necessarily 'holding' the document.
I have tried earlier this plugin - https://codecanyon.net/item/kyc-know-your-customer/44287244
With the shortcode it can be put anywhere on the site. If we would all together ask the team maybe they would integrate it into Fcom. I could send you the plugin maybe it would work for testing purposes.
IMHO - Tis an issue we will all face down the road. Here in Canada, the age is 13. Currently, a simple checkbox is all that is required. Following!
Stripe has this feature of ID check. Maybe you can find a way to integrate it. Have a look here
Hi everyone, following up on my previous post: The law was officially approved today in Portugal.
As of now, it is legally required to use a government-backed Digital Mobile Key for age verification to access social platforms.
Andre Gois Will be interesting to see how that progresses, and we've seen with the cookie law that they often make things too broad, but I'd be really surprised if this is an expectation of private member communities. It's geared toward tiktok, X, etc where you're in a global public forum and open to manipulation and abuse. Knowing lawmakers though it will probably affect everything.
Ross FCA I'd be more worried about the enforcers who don't understand how to interpret the law. Lock 'em all up and let the courts sort them out is a common philosophy.
Another attempt at censorship and surveillance? Sounds like Europe has really been heading in the right direction in recent years…
Coffs Trails tracking social media users by their ID only increases surveillance. Social media never required your personal ID before.
Marek don't worry, they already know who you are.
Wilco Wietsma If they knew, they would not ask for your ID...
I'm Australian - our lawmakers pioneered blocking social media for under 16s, and other nations are now following suit.
Of course, as any parent could tell you, teenagers are cunning and get around the blocks, or just move to other apps. But some kids (and some adults, like me) took the cue and exited social media. Life without Facebook and Insta is better.
According to the Australia law, they made an exception for platforms whose main function is educational so that students don’t lose access to Google classroom etc. I imagine the law will be similar, so check what the education exception is to see if you can make your community compliant with that. That’s what I’m doing.
Every law being cited (Australia, France, Portugal, as well as the emerging German debate) targets the same thing: platforms built around algorithmically curated feeds, infinite scrolling, attention-maximizing business models, and engagement loops designed to keep users hooked. That’s TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat. That’s not FluentCommunity.
Look at how the established players in this space already position themselves. Mighty Networks explicitly differentiates against Facebook Groups (https://www.mightynetworks.com/resources/mighty-networks-vs-facebook-groups). Circle calls itself a “distraction-free” community platform and frames Facebook’s algorithm as the problem, not the solution (https://circle.so/compare/vs-facebook). The Telegraph described Discord as the future of the internet precisely because it has “no algorithms, likes or advertising” (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/01/15/no-algorithms-likes-advertising-7bn-chat-app-discord-may-future/). These aren’t just marketing choices. They reflect a genuine structural difference that matters legally.
FluentCommunity belongs in that category. No recommendation algorithm, no personalized feed, no auto-play, no gamification loop. Users see what they choose to follow in communities they actively joined. That’s a forum. That’s a community. That is not what these laws are aimed at.
So the answer to the original question isn’t a new ID verification feature. It’s clarity about what FluentCommunity actually is. Build your platform with that framing baked in: community purpose, user-controlled experience, no algorithmic manipulation. Then you have a defensible position regardless of where the legislative dust settles.
Adding age verification infrastructure to a community platform that was never the target of these laws would be expensive, privacy-invasive, and frankly unnecessary. Don’t let vague political rhetoric push you into solving a compliance problem you don’t actually have.
no gamification loop.
I think the leaderboards feature would count as a gamification loop is the problem!
Shani Cipro What makes you believe that? The distinction matters here.
The gamification mechanics these laws are targeting are specific: variable reward notifications, streaks that punish inactivity, real-time like counters, slot-machine feed refreshes. The common thread is that they exploit compulsive behavior patterns to keep users engaged whether or not they intended to be. That’s the harm the research points to and that regulators are responding to.
A leaderboard is a ranking. It’s the same mechanic as a school honor roll, a chess rating, or a Stack Overflow reputation score. It reflects activity that already happened. It doesn’t create a loop that pulls users back through psychological pressure. To move up a leaderboard in FluentCommunity you have to contribute something. That’s active participation, not passive compulsion.
More practically: it’s an admin toggle. The entire regulatory concern with addictive mechanics is that they’re inescapable by design, built into the platform so that neither users nor operators can remove them. A feature that a community operator can simply turn off is the structural opposite of that.
If leaderboards were a problem, Circle, whose feature set FluentCommunity closely follows, GitHub, and every sports league on the planet would need age verification. That’s a stretch that the legislation simply doesn’t support.
On the related feature request to restrict the leaderboard to certain members or spaces: that’s a reasonable thing to want for community management reasons, but it doesn’t change the compliance picture one way or the other. The argument above stands regardless of how granularly the leaderboard is deployed.
André Daus That's a good justification, actually. I've just reached out to the eSafety Commission support team to see if I can get further clarification on this.
Shani Cipro nice move. I am curious what their response will be. Since many countries (including Germany) looking at those who already have laws in place, that is something we can learn from as well.
Shahjahan Jewel I wonder if we can make the features more granular? Right now, leaderboards, chats etc are either on or off for users. Is there a world where you can enable us to create different user types with different restriction levels?
Andre Gois, Michelle c/o Chiari Bridges Cole I've just reached out to Ross FCA from FC Addons as well to see if there's anything in his capability in terms of adding extra compliance features. He's excellent at responding and has huge visions for community addons, so maybe he has some ideas/suggestions on ways we can implement this easier? I'm not sure if I've included everything I would love to have, so please do join the discussion and add any of your own thoughts: https://fluentcommunityaddons.com/portal/space/requests/post/compliance-with-upcoming-age-restriction
We're a web developer and built wordpress sites since 2007. Wordpress started as a blog platform with authors writing stuff and readers commenting on each. Ultimately, would the law require those who comment to confirm their identity? Enhancing commenting tools can foster a community around a topic in numerous ways. Have readers sign in, become members etc. Then there's all the forum tools that provide interaction. are they going to target those? If it focuses on education, what kind of 'education' is the question? Who defines what we are allowed to learn or consume? https://meta.discourse.org/