Meta & Children's Online SafetyChat: the only requirement for age-gating on IG was by advertisers, around brand safety
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████ name redacted. Different bars may be the same person or different people.
quoted in an excerpt in the archive.
Monday 11 October 2021
09:59Michael Yehuda RothschildAdding for vis in case he has insight
10:04████It's not a mistake. It's intentional, by design, but from an out-dated set of requirements.
10:04████Specifically, in the past, the only requirement for age-gating on IG was by advertisers, around brand safety.
10:05████That's why the relevant infra and code are owned by the IG Ads team ("IG4B") as opposed to Well-being.
We never used that infra for Integrity. I don't even know how reliable it is.
10:05████So whoever wants to start using it for Integrity should chat with IG4B, see what gaps there are, etc.
10:06████Not opposed to enhancing it, just sharing that it was never designed or used for Integrity purposes in the past.
10:09████Couple of things given current news cycle 1/ Should we give Adam, policy, legal, comms a headsup 2/ should we file a sev and track it
10:10████For #1 @Miki@ it makes sense for the headsup to come from IGWB
10:11████Sure, why not? Can't hurt. But curious who made the assumption that this infra can be used for Integrity purposes, and who would fix the SEV?
10:11████It sounds like some folx just assumed age-gating would work for Integrity, when it was never planned to.
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10:12████It sounds like "we had some wishful thinking, found out it's wrong, so now we're filing a SEV to force someone else to fix it fast" :) None of this is a criticism, I'm probably missing something. Mostly just curious.
10:12████i think that's a fair point. The more important point is that this gap doesn't seem to be well known.
10/11/2021 10:12:42 PDT):
we can give the heads up and then decide if it should be a sev?
10:12████Sure. Can someone write it including what depends on it?
10:13████It wasn't a "gap" until now because nothing depended on it or tried to us eit (outside the well-known Ads use-cases).
10:13████can you frame the email for Miki and Yoav to take a look
10:13Yoav ShapiraI imagine some new functionality depends on this now?
10:44████we may be violating some policies without it
10:45████This has been part of policy for years (pre CI taking on IG directly, even), so the better question may be why IGWB never built this
10:45████There may have been good policy conversations that happened about it historically but I don't have the context.
10:46████It's never been brought up even once, as far as I know.
10:46████But to be clear we are not trying to build any new functionality here
10:46████This is literally the first time I hear about this infra being used for Integrity purposes, even in theory, since I've worked in the domain (2018).
10:46████IGWB handed this off to Ads years ago because we weren't using it at all, much less building it.
10:47████Can we separate the infra from the policy compliance problem? I don't know if the original intent was to use this infra specifically or what, but it's clear that something was overlooked here years ago, possibly before all of our time
10:47████[Sorry for maybe dup message, messages is flaky for me right no]
The gap is external community standards pages mentioning we age gate but not implemented in IG product.
Found this via action->UX audit. https://transparency.fb.com/policies/community-standards/violent- graphic-content/
10:48████Sure.
10:48████Yup, understood, not contested.
10:48████Y'all know we don't even have age on IG for a big chunk (last figure I saw was ~30%) of IG users, right?
10:49████There's a bunch of work, spurred on by the Youth work, that is helping improve coverage, but we didn't even ask any IG users for age until a few months ago.
10:49████I wonder if the authors of those web pages know that?
10:49████I saw that age verification is a push. At the very least, we should implement published behaviors whenever we do have the age.
10:50████Sure, and that's a good future. I just wonder how the pages above came to be, because I'd like to fix *that* underlying misunderstanding.
10:53████Put another way: I think Adam knows what this infra is used for, or not. A heads-up to Adam is OK (I don't mind, please write it as you see fit...), but it won't be news to him, as much as it's news to others.
10:54████Is there already a process that is prioritizing the open risks on IG youth that this can get plugged into for a more global prioritization?
10:55████████ ^^
11:00████This is a new issue that was raised only recently, as the teams highlighted when they were trying to build for the IGY product. I have a kickoff meeting tomorrow with several teams to get to ground truth on what we are and we are not age gating on IG, and begin scoping/workstreams/etc... I can work with the Youth Intiative to prioritize. As Yoav mentioned, our POs related to age this half has been to increase our stated age collection, improve coverage for age models, and build age verification methods to improve age accuracy.
11:02████Just sent email highlighting with high level info on this. Everyone here is included.