Irish regulator opens investigation into X’s age assurance, parental controls

Irish regulator Coimisiún na Meán has launched its first investigation under Ireland’s Online Safety Code. The target is X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, and the issue is “the potential ineffective implementation of age assurance mechanisms,” according to a release.

“Under the Online Safety Code, age assurance is required on the X platform to ensure that children do not see videos depicting pornography or extreme/gross and gratuitous violence or acts of cruelty on the platform,” the regulator says. Likewise, the law requires X, which allows adult-only content and also allows children under the age of 16 to use its service, to provide effective parental control systems.

“A concern exists that the parental controls put in place by X may not be effective, do not have minimum requirements, are hard to locate and are not brought to the attention of new users at sign-up stage, as required by the Code,” says Coimisiún na Meán.

As such, investigators will assess whether age assurance measures applied on X are effective in preventing kids from seeing adult content, and assess whether the parental control mechanisms in place give parents enough to work with in choosing what types of content their kids can look at. Efforts to notify users about these features will also be investigated.

Self-declaration for age checks ‘not sufficient’

John Evans, digital services commissioner at Coimisiún na Meán, says the regulator’s aim is clear: “we want a media landscape that upholds the rights, wellbeing and development of children and their safe engagement with content.”

He says its position on age assurance is equally clear: “any age assurance measure based solely on self-declaration is not sufficient.” And not following the law is expensive, in that the regulator can apply an administrative financial sanction that includes a fine of up to 10 percent of relevant annual turnover, or €20 million (USD$23.3 million), whichever is greater.

Per the release, An Coimisiún has opened five other investigations into platforms that are established in Ireland, within just the last year, under the EU Digital Services Act. An Coimisiún is also involved in four joint investigations which have been opened by the European Commission.

Ireland has taken a hard line on online safety, with a plan to run age assurance for age-restricted online content through a government-developed wallet app. Its stance has elicited public disgust from Elon Musk, who accused Irish leaders of wanting to lock up anyone they don’t agree with.

X: age assurance, if we absolutely must

As Musk’s sulking might suggest, X has never been especially opaque about its distaste for age assurance laws and regulation generally (even when its Grok chatbot began spitting out nonconsensual deepfake nudes at scale).

A statement on its website explains to users that “we are required by regulations including the UK’s Online Safety Act, the Irish Online Safety Code, the European Union Digital Services Act and Australia’s Online Safety Act, to estimate or verify whether you are over or under a certain age, for example, 18 for access to certain types of content.”

The company then goes on to list, among its selection of “age verification and estimation methods which are designed to be privacy-focused and user-friendly,” self-attested age signals for existing users.

Which is to say, it looks first at the information it already has to determine if a user is old enough to access adult content – a version of the profiling technique that Meta has also proposed as a viable age assurance method, though regulators disagree.

Other options the site may pursue if it does not already have information that can tell it how old a user is include email-based age estimation, phone-number-based estimation, facial age estimation (FAE) and, if a user chooses, ID-based age verification. These are expected to be available within weeks.

Article Topics

age verification  |  Coimisiún na Meán (CnM)  |  Ireland  |  Online Safety Code  |  social media  |  X (twitter)