WEF report explores online “interventions” including content removal, warning labels to protect kids

The WEF has taken an interest in online content moderation.

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The World Economic Forum (WEF) is “thinking of the children” – especially, it seems, if that real or convenient concern can be worked into the agenda of enhancing and expanding the limits of online censorship.

The particular focus of a piece published on the WEF site, from the pen of its “formative content” senior writer, has to do with the age of those who are signing up for social media, and the harms perceived to come out of allowing children under 13 to be present on social media.

The UK has long struggled with ways of adding age verification as declaratively a way to protect children, but at the same time raising many red flags regarding how these checks could seriously undermine privacy of everybody, and be misused and abused. WEF now cites UK’s telecommunications regulator Ofcom as presenting a report it commissioned, about the age of children on social platforms.

The WEF post doesn’t go deep into the Ofcom report’s methodology in coming up with the results, but the results are the following: children not only use fake age to sign up to social media, but often have their parents’ consent for this, and more – the parents are helping under 13’s get on there.