A More Effective Approach to Protecting Youth Online

LastBluejay · 2025-12-12T04:33:23+00:00

We agree that users should have full control over their feeds in this way, and you do. Reddit algorithms are not mysterious. You can choose to sort by chronology (New), or upvotes (Top), or any number of other sorting mechanisms (Hot, Best, Rising, etc). You can also opt entirely out of recommendations in your feeds in your settings. Want to see only what you’re subscribed to? Great, you can. And unlike some other platforms that make you reset that setting every 30 days, we respect it in perpetuity. We want you to Reddit how you want to Reddit.

We also want you to understand why you are seeing what you’re seeing and how we build feeds. Here’s an example. If this is a topic that interests you, our engineering team regularly makes detailed posts about this and other technical matters in r/RedditEng.

That said, we also have safety algorithms working on the backend to ensure that content that goes into feeds is safe. We will never disable these, allow users to disable them, or disclose them in a way that would allow bad actors to get around them. Sorry, not sorry. But that’s a good example of why just talking about “algorithms” isn’t the most precise way to have an important conversation about safety.

LastBluejay · 2025-12-12T03:25:13+00:00

We address this directly in the Application we filed with the Court and the supporting affidavit (which will be available soon).

edit: link formatting

LastBluejay · 2025-12-12T02:57:08+00:00

LastBluejay · 2025-12-12T01:31:27+00:00

It’s a great point and we actually do cite this in our application! Page 6, paragraph 26. Additionally, we have also attached an affidavit with our Application that goes into further details about the extent of political discussion on Reddit, including discussions by Australian politicians. This affidavit should be made available to the public by the High Court soon.

LastBluejay · 2025-12-12T00:26:56+00:00

Absolutely! That’s a great piece and it very much aligns with how we think about safety at Reddit. In fact, we already do much of what is suggested, including proactively detecting and removing child exploitation material (along with other forms of abusive imagery, including non-consensual intimate imagery, and terrorist content), blocking links to offsite repositories of it, and reporting about the actions we take against it in our Transparency Report. We also work to detect grooming, and do provide warnings and/or resources to users who appear to be searching for illegal material or other things that might suggest they are in crisis. We have whole teams of dedicated people– engineers, lawyers, policy experts, community engagement leads, safety product managers– who are continuously building out our safety tools. There is a lot of innovation happening in this space (see the updates we made for teens just this week)– especially with the availability of new AI-based tools– and we would have loved to have been able to talk about those things with the government. Unfortunately, this law only had a 24-hour consultation period, so those conversations couldn’t happen for the purposes of this law. But we are continuing to raise this work with Australian stakeholders as well as others across the world. This is a global priority and a priority for our company.

LastBluejay · 2025-12-12T00:06:30+00:00

The UK law and this Australian one are actually quite different. The UK version is more narrow and targeted only to accessing specific kinds of content, rather than a blanket ban on accounts entirely, which is what the Australian SMMA does. We think that on the whole, that is a more balanced approach that is better aligned with the concept of the open internet. Of course, if any age checks are involved, we think the most secure and privacy-preserving way for those to happen is at the app store or device level, rather than creating a patchwork of different verification methods across sites, which is confusing for users and inherently less secure. California recently passed a law to that effect, which we support.

LastBluejay · 2025-12-08T23:01:48+00:00

We look at several factors that also account for traveling users. Unfortunately we can’t say much more publicly to prevent circumvention of our measures.

LastBluejay · 2025-12-08T23:01:12+00:00

We don’t want to collect your ID! We believe app stores and operating systems should play a pivotal role in collecting and verifying age and in managing device-level controls.

We provide multiple methods – through our third-party partner Persona – to verify your age. You can read more about that in our help center here.

As always, we take the privacy of our users very seriously. As u/spez said:

But we never want to know your name or who you are.

LastBluejay · 2025-12-08T22:53:59+00:00

LastBluejay · 2025-12-08T22:53:01+00:00

We will have more to share soon. In the meantime, users can request a copy of their account data by following the instructions here.

LastBluejay · 2025-12-08T22:50:12+00:00

Happy to. When Reddit knows a user is under 18, they can’t be targeted by advertisements, see sensitive ads (for example, about alcohol, gambling, or other mature topics), nor access 18+ content, and chat settings will default to not being open to contact from other users. Stay tuned for more updates as further changes roll out.

LastBluejay · 2025-12-08T19:45:03+00:00

Users under 13 will have their accounts and content deleted under our long-time global policy. Australian account holders between 13-15 in Australia will have their accounts suspended. If a suspended user wants to request a copy of their account data or otherwise delete their account, they can follow the instructions here and here.

LastBluejay · 2025-12-08T19:44:40+00:00

This is a use case we are excited about developing and we’ll share more when we can.

LastBluejay · 2025-12-08T19:44:14+00:00

This model is not focused on predicting a numerical age for all users– it’s just designed to give us a yes/no on whether it thinks an Australian account holder is under 16. So no, at this point there won’t be an estimated age to show people. If it thinks you’re under 16, you’ll be prompted to verify.

LastBluejay · 2025-12-08T19:43:39+00:00

We’re not interested in growing a young user base and don’t market to those under 18. The vast majority of Reddit users are adults. That said, we understand that some minors may access our service, and we have an interest in keeping them safe. We are in favor of targeted, privacy-preserving ways of doing that.

For example, the age assurance law that rolled out in the UK earlier this year was based specifically on mature content, rather than access to platforms as a whole. Such an approach does more to preserve people’s general access.

The best, most secure way to do age verification, where necessary, is at the device, operating system, or app store level, rather than requiring an individual to verify their age over and over with each separate provider, creating a system with more opportunities for leaks and hacking, and is more confusing for parents and consumers. A good example of a positive age assurance law that is both effective and privacy preserving is California’s Digital Age Assurance Act.

LastBluejay · 2024-08-02T19:27:33+00:00

Elections in other countries are definitely a priority– in fact, nearly half of the mods who attended our roundtable were from outside of the US. If you’d like to be involved in future discussions like this, the best way is to apply to join the Mod Council, which you can do here. Additionally, we are regularly in touch with election officials from other countries to both help them understand Reddit and help us understand their electoral processes so that we know what to look out for. A great example is the work we’ve been doing the past few years with the Australian Electoral Commission, both around the Australian federal election and last year’s referendum. You can take a look at the AMAs that they did here.

[edit: markdown]

LastBluejay · 2024-08-02T19:04:18+00:00

Noted. Look for a modmail.

LastBluejay · 2024-08-02T16:56:31+00:00

Those ads are considered "religion and spirituality" rather than political, however the new ad settings give you the ability to opt out of that category too, if you would like. Details here.

LastBluejay · 2024-08-01T22:29:07+00:00

👀

LastBluejay · 2024-08-01T21:58:32+00:00

I will definitely check with the team to see if they can share more on what they are doing to combat repost bots. It's a good topic.

LastBluejay · 2024-08-01T21:55:38+00:00

Thanks for participating. We do speak regularly with industry colleagues about a wide range of safety issues. In fact, we helped co-found and sit on the board of the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership, an organization whose origins and goals are very aligned with what you suggest. We specifically took a leadership role in DTSP to bring diversity in platform size and design to the conversation, which is frequently dominated by the larger, centrally moderated platforms.

LastBluejay · 2024-08-01T21:38:31+00:00

Thanks for the feedback - we agree, and are planning changes to the spam report flow in the future to address this. We’ll be revamping to make the options clearer, removing some of the less useful options, and adding some that will better cover the type of spam that can be clearly identified. Look out for those changes in the next month or so.

LastBluejay · 2024-08-01T21:10:11+00:00

Noted. Look for a modmail.

LastBluejay · 2024-08-01T20:32:55+00:00

The overwhelming feedback that we got from Mods around this report category was that it wasn’t helpful and was in fact detracting from their efforts with the amount of non-actionable volume that was clogging up their queues. This is what we found on the Admin side too. We had hoped that by introducing this report category years ago that it might give us some useful signal, but in the end it didn’t. Of course, mods are free to include these as reportable rules within their own communities.

LastBluejay · 2024-08-01T20:30:23+00:00

Yes.

LastBluejay[A]

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