Thomas Lebonniec for Nouvel Obs: Platform Moderators Are More Likely to Protect Users Than Digital Identity Controls

In a recent article for Nouvel Obs, Thomas Lebonniec and Neil S. question the intentions behind a proposed law to ban children under the age of fifteen from accessing social media.

Their argument is straightforward: protecting children online is a legitimate and urgent concern, but age restrictions should not become a pretext for introducing systematic digital identity controls at the expense of fundamental privacy rights.

For the authors, identity verification is a strategy of obfuscation: by placing the emphasis on users’ identities and ages, it risks diverting attention from the ways in which platforms themselves produce and regulate harmful content, while opening the door to forms of mass surveillance in the name of protecting minors online.

Lebonniec instead calls on policymakers to take a closer look at data workers, and more specifically at content moderators, the workers who put platforms moderation guidelines into practice. Their work can help explain why some accounts identified as belonging to sexual predators are not removed, why potentially dangerous content remains online, and why harmful material can sometimes slip through the platforms’ moderation systems.

This, in turn, means that legislators should pay closer attention to both the moderation guidelines themselves and the working conditions under which moderators apply them. These workers are routinely exposed to disturbing and psychologically demanding content, often at the cost of their own mental health, while being paid very little for work that is central to the safety and governance of digital platforms.

Read the full article in French here