Age assurance not 'completely robust', French for takedown and Lula has platforms in his sights
Hello and welcome to Everything in Moderation's Week in Review, your need-to-know news and analysis about platform policy, content moderation and internet regulation. It's written by me, Ben Whitelaw and supported by paid members like you.
Before getting into today's edition, a reminder: there are just a few days left to complete the 2026 EiM Subscriber Survey, which is how I find out what you want more of as well as what you’d happily lose. It takes just a few minutes and I every response shapes what I do next.
Looking forward to seeing some of you next week. As ever, thanks for reading — BW
Hash matching only finds CSAM that has already been catalogued.
Resolver’s Frances McAuley shares what happened when Athena, its unknown CSAM detection service, scored 2.8 million live images: 71% of IWF-held material detected in independent testing, fewer than 1 in 2,000 images sent to specialist review, and four confirmed cases no hash would have caught.
Plus why accuracy isn’t one number, and how platforms can set their own threshold.
Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
With the UK teen social media ban on the horizon (EiM #343), Ofcom yesterday published its rapid assessment of age assurance methods to inform how the ban might work in practice. It names four methods that meet its “highly effective” standard, although one of those — facial estimation — has a margin of error that means anyone close to the cut-off age of 16 would need an additional age check. With 150,000 16- and 17-year-olds without a formal ID, there’s a risk that a significant number of young people could be locked out of internet services come March next year, unless MPs are careful.
No silver bullet: save for the dubious inclusion of facial estimation in the “highly effective” bucket, Ofcom’s assessment is mostly clear-eyed about the limitations of current age assurance methods. It admits “no age assurance method is completely robust against circumvention by children” and says it will "monitor emerging developments in the market" — which feels a bit hopeful. Another report about the potential role of app stores in protecting children stops short of advocating a specific direction, but its existence suggests it is a possible route.
An amendment to existing laws in France could give the government the power to force platforms to remove posts inciting insurrection within one hour. Amendment 94 was debated on Tuesday, a week after the government called an emergency meeting with platforms to discuss curbing protest footage and asked mobile providers to block platforms wholesale. With the recent Quad9 news, this isn’t a great look for Emmanuel Macron’s party ahead of next March’s election.
Also in this section...
- UAE introduces comprehensive child digital safety framework (IAPP)
- Africa weighs age limits as social media safety rules tighten worldwide (Lexology)
- 19 Republican AGs want to outlaw sharing abortion information (Abortion Everyday)
Ctrl-Alt-Speech Patreon exclusive: A Midterm Night's Dream
This week, Mike and I chew over Lula in La La Land, what we can expect in the US midterms, for our extended Patreon episode, the potential effect of Ofcom's age assurance report on the social media ban conversation.
Become a regular Supporter or highly-effective, age assured Insider to get extended episodes, early access and the chance to shape which stories we cover each free.
Products
Features, functionality and technology shaping online speech
The rise of AI agents is already changing traditional paradigms of safety, security and autonomy, and we’re seeing more reporting and analysis about what that looks like in practice:
- Training data: The New York Times had agents “capture a flag” to show how incentives and penalties play an outsized role in the way models — like the OpenAI one that hacked Hugging Face (EiM #348) — behave.
- Human input: Anthropic published a new paper in which they found that analysts deferred to agents’ preferences in 86% of decisions, often without crediting the agent, raising questions about the role of human judgement in policy development scenarios.
- Monitoring: Two researchers at Partnership on AI lay out what needs to be done to improve agent observability.
Alice Hunsberger
Platforms
Social networks and the application of content guidelines
With the US midterms fast approaching (next Tuesday), we’re seeing the usual mix of concern and pre-briefed platform safety announcements:
- According to Politico, OpenAI will set up an election war room to track interference efforts — similar to what Meta and other platforms have done for past elections (EiM #87). It previously released an update to its models that prevents photorealistic depictions of polling or ballot-related imagery.
- A report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found errors in election information given by leading models, including Meta’s Muse Spark and Twitter/X’s Grok, with little transparency as to how models should behave.
- Google, TikTok and Anthropic have all previously shared their plans for the midterms — some later than others.
The European Commission has accepted a plan from Temu to review how its recommender systems “may amplify the spread of illegal goods”, following its €200m fine under the Digital Services Act earlier this year (EiM #341).
Also in this section...
- Meta’s $25 billion legal loss just put blood in the water (The Verge)
- Meta’s “whisper strategy” against Jonathan Haidt (The Verge)
- r/opensource banned AI, non-English speakers, and more (The Verge)
- She Trusted ChatGPT With Her Medication Decisions. It Cost Her Everything. (New York Times)
People
Those impacting the future of online safety and moderation
As comebacks go, it was up there with 1995 Michael Jordan. Against all the odds, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won re-election last Sunday, after adding more than 10 million votes to his first-round total. Media reports say a giant and very active WhatsApp channel was the cause of the turnaround.
That won’t stop him from going after the company that owns WhatsApp or other Big Tech platforms that he says tried “to steer this country’s electoral outcome.” His victory speech promised that digital communication would form a large part of his government.
You can understand his frustration. His own Facebook profile was restricted during the campaign, which Meta put down to “technical failures”, and many of his supporters reported account takedowns. This, according to a co-authored piece in Tech Policy Press, appears to have galvanised Lula’s supporters, even bringing them out to protest outside Meta’s London and São Paulo offices.
Check out the full list of people in one place, with a link back to the edition they appeared in > EiM People Directory
Posts of note
Handpicked posts that caught my eye this week
- “I have talked with many other scholars, parents, and teachers out there who agree that regardless of where you sit on the social media to harms continuum, universal bans are not the answer.” — UC Irvine’s Gillian Hayes on why social media bans aren’t as clear cut as many think they are
- “It’s a deep exploration of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions.” — Konstantinos Komaitis on his recently published series, “The Metric is Not the Mission”
- “I toiled over The Nerd Reich in obscurity, never quite sure if anyone would care. But two months after its release, the momentum continues to build in the most surreal ways.” — Gil Duran’s book is already on my to-read list. Glad to see it’s making waves.
Member discussion