Limit/block interaction with minors

[wurayan]

Describe the Feature

I know there is already an age restriction on the app and that minors often lie about their age to use social media, but lately some friends have been complaining about the amount of minors either on their feeds (especially on Discover) or actually interacting with them by following, liking, etc., and even though some of them don't exactly post +18 content, it's uncomfortable to have minors interacting with something they shouldn't have access to.

P.S. If there's already a solution or workaround for this kind of situation, please let me know, because we've been trying to deal with this for some time now, like blocking every minor who appears in our feeds and muting words that were common in their posts (e.g. "school");

Attachments

No response

Describe Alternatives

Some suggestions would be:

• Have an option to set the minimum age or limit minors from seeing your account or posts (even if you don't actually post anything that's +18);
• Tagging an account as underage for moderation, not to ban or anything (I don't know Bluesky's age restrictions for each country), but to help filter the user to another accounts that also doesn't want minors interacting.

Additional Context

No response

[JamesKoenig]

agree (with caveats) with the feature as described in the request.

I agree that there should be an option to limit one's account visibility to prevent them from being seen by underage audiences.

Even outside of adult content creation fields (e.g. irreverent comedy figures, sex workers, artists); Businesses like ones producing alcohol, dating apps/services, people reporting on bloodshed/conflicts, gambling institutions, job board postings, classifieds/marketplace posts, event promoters, etc, may all have express reasons to make their content or even entire account not viewable or interactable by underage users on the platform.

the big caveat is that underage status, regardless of underlying mechanism for storing that, should never in any way be visible for end-users due to the potential for it in assisting with predation.

[wurayan]

Oh yeah, I'm totally against having an underage flag visible to end users, I probably phrased it wrong if that was the impression on the issue; I was thinking more of an option to "report" an account if the user ends up lying about their age, so they don't bypass age moderation to interact. I often see people lie about their age when they create an account, but later change their bio to reflect their real age; Still, I don't think this is a good solution, but I'd like to see more people discuss it;

[JamesKoenig]

Oh absolutely! Sorry about that, and the tone. I felt like it was best to be unambiguous and err on the side of caution.

I'll edit my post's language to reflect that it's a caveat and not disagree since the current language misrepresents your perspective.

[Gudine]

Stopping underaged users from seeing your account could be done privately (client-side, maybe? I think feeds can't read private information either), but I don't think stopping you from seeing their posts would be possible, since you could then just, say, create a dummy feed with only one user to check if they're underage, or some more complicated setup than that.

[kkaatthheerriinnee]

It would be much easier to allow profiles to label themselves using the porn or sexual self-labels. Those who are under 18 will simply have these profiles hidden by default.

[Tamschi]

It would be much easier to allow profiles to label themselves using the porn or sexual self-labels. Those who are under 18 will simply have these profiles hidden by default.

And all other users too.

All this unfortunately differs too much between countries to just have a self-applicable "only adults" label, though. I think what's needed is a mechanism for "only adults at least x years old can see this".

I don't think this can feasibly be bidirectional without accurately leaking other users' ages at some point in time, though, not even in the simple "only adults" variant. The best Bluesky can do is have the age-and-adulthood gate as a visibility setting for ones own profile and for AppViews to reject individual records whenever a minor/someone underaged tries to interact with someone who has that preference set. That again would only work for users who specified their age privately to that same AppView though.

Maybe the best that's feasible is a generic "adults only" self-label on accounts after all.

[kkaatthheerriinnee]

Maybe the best that's feasible is a generic "adults only" self-label on accounts after all.

It is what has worked for many other sites with minimal complaints, after all. Why reinvent the wheel?

[as925]

I hope that people under the age of 18 will not be able to follow adult accounts. (Whether they can see the post or not) I spend a lot of time checking and blocking non-adult accounts. It pains me to have to prompt them to state their age in their profile section for me to make a decision. I feel nervous in situations where minors might be watching. Because my remarks and reposts might have a negative impact on them. Creators are working on every platform worrying about this. Many times I witnessed them eventually stop speaking out and stop interacting with each other. But this is a difficult issue to handle in social networking.