Hi All,
Due to some overbearing/draconian laws coming into place in the UK, I need to take steps to protect the site long term. You may have already seen this post in /c/technology which proves that these laws have a real negative effect on small independent websites, especially those hosted/run by people in the UK.
While I assume this will play out the same as GDPR did and actually most things will be fine, one thing that continues to be an issue is how Lemmy handles NSFW content and account creation.
Currently Lemmy.zip offers accounts to anyone 13+ (or whatever the minimum age is in your country), and asks that you only activate the NSFW flag if you are 18+.
However we have no way to enforce that, nor turn if off if someone says they’re under 18, nor really any way of monitoring that process. Lemmy does not currently give admins the ability to add extra confirmations about age, or a customisable pop up warning when that flag is clicked, or the ability to add more text to the button, or anything like that during the signup process, without creating custom UI stuff (which I am not able to do). The outcome of this is that anyone is able to just click the “Enable NSFW” flag during signup or in their profile settings, and view NSFW content, without any explicit check.
It would be great if the functionality of Lemmy was changed to make this more accommodating to children so they can’t access NSFW content, however that could take a long time to implement and I want this site to be safe before this law comes in to effect in March.
In order to make things as simple as possible going forwards, I am therefore proposing:
From the 1st of February 2025, Lemmy.zip will only offer a service to people who are over 18.
Before I go any further with this, I am asking all Lemmy.zip users to share their thoughts on what this change might mean. I know the Fediverse tends to skew older, but I am also aware that this might affect some current users too.
I am not asking anyone under 18 to dox themselves either, if you’re worried this might apply to you, you are more than welcome to reach out via PMs or preferably Matrix (my link is in my profile).
This restriction makes it clear that you must be 18 to have an account on the site and therefore removes some of the burden on the age verification, and although it isn’t the perfect solution, it moves us slightly further away from any grey areas in the law.
There is an alternative though. I could turn off NSFW completely and then no one would be able to see any content marked NSFW, even if it’s not actually NSFW. This obviously isn’t something I want to do either.
Happy to hear thoughts/concerns, but would appreciate any feedback either way on this. I’ll leave this up a couple of days to give people a chance to read it.
Thanks
Demigodrick
Footnotes:
-
some of this actually already exists under The Digital Economy Act 2017 (age verification), and the upcoming Online Safety Bill puts further duties on websites to shield children from NSFW content, which is where the software lacks in features.
-
The Ofcom Online Safety Bill guidelines are over 1000 pages long. There is no provision for small independent websites, they are lumped in with the likes of Meta. Ofcom seem to think paying tens of thousands of pounds to update websites with their suggestions is “reasonable”. It is clearly not.
As a dad I approve of this message. I mainly use this instance for news which by default is open to interpretation & requires a little extra effort than I would expect anyone as young as 13 to automatically engage with.
When it comes to legality it is not reasonable for us to ask instance admins to risk themselves over something like age requirements for NSFW content. I fully agree with this decision if you feel it is necessary to protect yourself, which seems to be the correct take.
As long as I don’t have to give personal, identifying info, I’m down.
I’m okay with it as long as I don’t have to send you a copy of my ID
You need to actually read the guidance, an “I am 18” checkbox isn’t going to cut it.
Stage 1: Is it possible for children to access the service or part of it? Under the Online Safety Act, ‘children’ means anyone under 18.
You can only conclude that it is not possible for children to access your service if you are using age verification or age estimation (together known as age assurance), which prevents children from normally being able to access that service.
[…]
Examples of age assurance methods that have the potential to meet the above criteria include:
photo-ID matching
facial age estimation
reusable digital identity services.Examples of age assurance methods that are not highly effective include:
payment methods which do not require the user to be over 18
your terms and conditions say the service is for over 18s onlyWow, that’s really messed up. It seems purpose-built to destroy small websites. I’m sure no one involved would publicly admit this, but I don’t know how it could reasonably exist without them being aware of that.
I don’t disagree that’s it’s not highly effective, but Lemmy doesn’t have any other built in tooling for this and in order to move in the right direction, with the lack of tooling, moving to 18+ only is just a step in the right direction.
There’s over 1000 pages of guidance, and of ofcom haven’t released their risk assessment yet, so things should be clearer when that is available - for now, I feel it’s important to at least not offer a service to under 18s if we can’t guarantee they don’t look at NSFW content.
I will also add that their “effective” methods are not reasonable for small independent sites, and the whole act shows a complete disregard for an independent Internet.
I’m not saying the guidance is good or sensible, I’m saying that you currently have the same options as LFGSS - spend an inordinate amount of money verifying users or shut down. It explicitly calls out your solution as unacceptable, regardless of your feelings. Yes, the methods are unreasonable, yes the government wants complete control over the internet, no it’s not going to make a difference when you cop your £18 mil fine. Welcome to the UK, it fucking sucks, get used to it.
8.54 Following our November 2023 Consultation, Ofcom included proposals on highly effective age assurance (‘HEAA’) in the December 2023 Consultation on our guidance for service providers publishing pornographic content on their online services (‘Part 5 guidance’). Age assurance proposals were also included for U2U services in our May 2024 Consultation. However, our expectations around HEAA will not be finalised at the time we publish these Illegal Content Codes of Practice for U2U services.
8.55 Therefore, rather than delay the introduction of the safety defaults measure, we proposed in our November 2023 Consultation that we should initially introduce the measure with a stipulation that services should only be in scope if they have an existing means of identifying child users, whether that is a form of age assurance or another method.
The HEAA guidance isn’t yet published, and neither is the risk assessment documentation, so we don’t actually know what type of category we’ll fall in to yet to even make the decision LFGSS made. Admittedly they are a magnitude larger than lemmy.zip and probably fall higher up the risk assessment than us.
It also doesn’t apply if there isn’t already an age verification process in place (until the above HEAA guidance is published)
I mean you might get an exemption by disabling DMs, but even low risk carries a lot of requirements that aren’t going to be cheap or easy to maintain.
It also doesn’t apply
Doesn’t initially apply. You are buying yourself a few months at most.
Seems fine to me. I’d even be okay with full NSFW blocking if that seems safer legally speaking. Do what you gotta do to reduce any danger to yourself.
Kids never lie about their age to watch internet porn. They also never lie about their age to click a button allowing NSFW content or when registering for a social media site.
Absolutely, but then they’ve lied instead of us willingly offering a service. It’s not the perfect solution by a long shot, but it’s a step in the right direction for now
To be honest, if this protects the longevity of this site then I think it’s OK.
It’s legal issue and we don’t really have much choice but to follow, if a simple checkbox (We all know that is going to stop no one) is going to save us problem, then I don’t see why not.
I think out of all the options, this one is the most reasonable. As long as it doesn’t involve providing ID.
The UK governments overreach here is absolutely ridiculous. Isn’t the de-facto E2EE encryption ban coming into effect soon too?
EDIT: Oh. I think this is the same legislation :/
Yeah, further evidence that the UK government is incompetent.
The whole thing sucks but your approach seems reasonable. In the grand scheme of things I’d prefer to be on an instance that allows NSFW even if that’s not what I’m normally interacting with on Lemmy. Plus a lot of things get lumped into the NSFW category which makes me wonder what else you’d end up blocking besides the pr0n stuff.
Maybe the alternative approach is just to not bother hosting in the UK while this legislation is active but I can appreciate that may not be something you want to bother pursuing.
Yeah, turning off NSFW also kills the ability to have image spoilers, interact with art communities, and work with any community that uses it for things like content warnings instead of adult entertainment. Not something I’d want to do.
Unfortunately the scope of this law is for any site offering a service to a UK resident (completely unenforceable and written by insane people) and i have the misfortune of living in the UK so it doubly applies to me.
Suggestions for setting up a company in another country do sound appealing to get around this though, but sounds costly.
it sounds like the people calling these shots (who also have no fucking clue how the internet works) are trying to force everyone to upload their photo ID to some third party age verification business, which i will 100% NOT do.
it’s mind-bogglingly stupid. what kid over 2 years old doesn’t know where dad keeps his wallet and when is a good time to snap a picture of his ID to upload? also, who’s getting the shit end of the stick when these age verification sites inevitably get hacked, and now your ID is all over the dark web? it sure as hell won’t be the verification site
if it has to be zero NSFW, at least for the time being, then that’s what it has to be.
If age verification is anything more than check box to confirm you’re over 18, then unfortunately bye bye. As for blocking NSFW I also don’t want. As there’s no way to block porn and leave other NSFW posts. I understand you have to do what you have to do, but this would kill this otherwise excellent instance.
Edit. Actual age verification, like send in a photo of your license is a hard no. But a DM to everyone saying by continuing to use you confirm you are over 18 and a check box on sign up or similar sounds reasonable.
With the current UI there is just check boxes to enable/disable NSFW. Even if you had to explicitly tick a box to say you are 18 before the NSFW box was visible would be a good solution, I think.
I certainly do not want to turn NSFW off at all though, just highlighting that its an extreme option, and with the current way things work with Lemmy there is no in between.
I also would absolutely not want to deal with checking people’s IDs, nobody has time for that!
Same. I will not dox myself for access to this instance. Even if it’s to a third party that pinky swears not to disclose my identity. I’ll set up my own instance if necessary.
I guess I’m fine with a checkbox but what’s even the point in that case.
Is it enough to do “18+ only if you’re in UK, otherwise we don’t care”?
Maybe (hopefully!)
Once the risk assessment is released and I’ve had chance to scour 1000+ pages of guidance, it is possible. It was a thought in the back of my mind, yes. Will have to look at the wording, and USA is still COPPA i believe which is 13+, although I need to do some research how that works regarding NSFW content
I think this is fine just to be on the safe side with the law - reddit had, and probably has, the same restriction in place.
Unless Lemmy implements age verification, you can just lie about your age, though, so even if you were underage, nothing changes for people signing up, really, does it?
Yeah absolutely, it doesn’t stop anyone lying about their age. I’m hoping it’s just enough to say that if someone was to report it to whoever, we can turn around and say “they lied about their age”. We could even do it now, but the enable NSFW buttons have no surrounding text to repeat the age warning (and there’s nothing at all in the profile option!) which is what worries me the most.
IIRC, Reddit just had the 13+ age limit mandated by COPPA. I’m guessing they’ll have to make the NSFW restrictions more of a hassle than just a checkbox, but they’re a huge company that can afford to do what they want.
It is kind of crazy that this exists all. What’s even more crazy is that it seems to apply to people not living in the UK. I wonder if it would be possible for you to create a legal entity that is a foreign country that you work for as a foreign worker.
Yeah, its insane. They expect this to be done by every website providing services to UK users. The overreach is just mad. And completely unenforceable too.
I imagine many UK sites will go down that route, especially with how many Mastadon servers there are in the UK. I’d be up for doing that if it was feasible (financially and technically).
lemmynsfw.com has a popup in place
It does, which I did have a look at, but it only displays once (and maybe feels a touch overbearing for just a general instance where you might see nsfw?)
Mainly it doesn’t stop anyone from activating NSFW content - I think my biggest worry is the toggle in the user settings has no warnings or anything.
But if you have a one time pop up, or warning, or whatever, on the one thing you can control (the sign ups) does that not cover you? The rest is lemmy itself or app creators, and should not cause you legal issues? Idk with fediverse stuff that is a bit weird so how that works.
I am fine with moving age to 18, removing all NSFW would be sad to miss a few posts because of a country I don’t even live in.
Unfortunately it’s not really clear at the moment. I’m hoping it will cover us, and by enforcing our T&cs we’re fine. However they may be requesting age validation. At least making it 18+ puts us in the right direction for now, and worry about the rest in the new year. There will be some way around it.
