Questions about the new minimum age for diamond moderators

Question

Today we've released a policy that moderators must be 18 years old or older to be diamond moderators on our sites. Since the policy post isn't well-suited to address questions about the policy, that's what this post is for.

Prior to release, this policy was shown to the Moderator Council and Moderators for review and discussion. While there are certainly mods who voiced concern about the policy and why we're enacting it, on the whole it was well-received.

Before asking questions, please review the policy post as well as the additional information provided in this post about the immediate impacts of this policy - they were excluded from the policy post as they are one-time events that relate only to the transition period.

What does this mean for existing mods?

Once this policy is live, moderators will see a banner on the site. If they're 18 or older, they can just dismiss the banner and that's all they need to do.

Any moderator who is currently under 18 years of age should email the Community Management team. We'll reach out to them to begin the process of removing their diamond. As mentioned in the policy post, if they're currently under 18, they still have the opportunity to return to moderation once they reach 18 through a simplified moderator reinstatement process.

Is this a change to the Moderator Agreement?

This is a new policy but we do not consider it a change to the Moderator Agreement itself, even though we will add the checkbox to affirm that you're 18+ to the Agreement page. As such, we will not be moving to V3 of the Moderator Agreement due to this change.

Why was this change made?

There was an assumption internally that moderators were already expected to be at least 18 to moderate the site. When it was discovered not to be the case, we worked to understand and address the concerns and create the policy that was lacking. We then discussed it with the moderators and made it public.

We understand that this is a change some may be disappointed by and that it may seem to indicate that we don't believe that younger members of our communities can be great moderators - over the years we have known many mods who started out under 18 and were excellent and active moderators. Nothing has changed in that regard - but for the legal reasons outlined in the policy, we can not give them a diamond and access to user PII.

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I've tried to address some of the concerns I heard in the Mod Team and I hope they address ones you have. If you have other questions, please feel free to ask them but do know that I'm not a lawyer and we can not answer your legal questions about this policy. My understanding is that when it comes to volunteers, there's not a lot of legal precedence, so we're erring on the side of caution in protecting both potential moderators and our users' PII.

Answer 1

I don't have a question; I can read between the lines and see what likely motivated this change; given what I know, I cannot rightly even be surprised.

Just sad. Deeply, deeply sad.

So I'll leave you with the words of one of my favorite SE people, Grace Note, from a happier, more hopeful time:

There are only two ways to be a moderator - you have to be handpicked by the Team, or you have to be elected by the community. This isn't a job that just anyone can get - people get this job through the merits of their contributions and activity on the site. We've both appointed and elected young moderators across the entire network, and they've proven to be as responsible and capable as the adult moderators, sometimes even shining above their older compatriots on the same sites. So, no, I don't think we should implement an age requirement, because we'd lose a number of very good moderators for reasons completely unrelated to their own ability to help us succeed as a network.

Answer 2

Less of a question than just...

I'm disappointed.

You state:

We understand that this is a change some may be disappointed by and that it may seem to indicate that we don't believe that younger members of our communities can be great moderators - over the years we have known many mods who started out under 18 and were excellent and active moderators. Nothing has changed in that regard - but for the legal reasons outlined in the policy, we can not give them a diamond and access to user PII.

That's a heck of an understatement. Some of the most active and influential moderators on the network started under 18; off the top of my head, there's Doorknob and HDE 226868, as well as Undo, heather, and ArtOfCode, all three of whom are on the moderator council.
(And myself, having become a mod at age 14.)

You're cutting yourselves off from a group of people who have proven themselves to be only an asset and well-liked by the community. I understand that this is for legal reasons, but, for instance, having a parent sign an agreement should be an option.

This is extremely disappointing.

Answer 3

Stack Exchange Inc. is managing legal risk. And we, as a community, should be worried as there are obviously forces within the management team that believe this risk exists and believe this risk needs to be mitigated with more legal stuff.

The management has made the wrong choice by giving these "contracts" in the hands of the legal department and legal advisors. The management made the wrong choice by pushing forward when they were briefed about the proposed changes.

I believe these changes are only in the benefit of the legal department, the management and future investors because now this risk is mitigated. Up to the next risk. More contracts, more rules!

Why can't the management be brave and ask the legal experts to come up with a solution that doesn't make contracts legally binding, that doesn't add more legal blah-blah on the burden of your community of volunteers. Yes, that is complex, hard, risky, maybe impossible, certainly unheard of but hey, you're the professionals: fix it.

I want to remind Stack Exchange that I'm not an employee. I'm not on your payroll. Yet it feels like you treat me as if I am. I don't like being considered a legal risk, not by SEI, not by the lawyers SEI hires or by their venture capitalists. To me it looks like SE has only done itself a favor.

I'm not sure you can keep pushing that legal stuff on me forever. I'm afraid this won't be the last legally motivated change the volunteers here are going to see.

Answer 4

When I was a community manager, I personally selected moderators I knew (or strongly suspected) were high school students. It invariably made me uncomfortable for a variety of reasons. But in the end, I felt it was my duty to select people who would best serve their communities as moderators. If that person turned out to be a little younger than I preferred, it was my duty to get over my prejudice and do what was right for each site's community.

I understand the policy is due to age of majority laws. That makes a certain deal of sense because you don't want one party of an agreement to be too young to legally be bound by it. (Of course that doesn't take care of the other side of the agreement.¹) And since the moderator agreement is now a legal contract, they now have legal obligations to Stack Exchange, Inc.

This is a change in culture from when Aarthi said:

Understand that moderation creates its own culture, and this is (in part) status-bydesign. However, also remember that moderators enforce community norms and are, themselves, people who love the site just as much as you or I. It's not your site any more than it is theirs.

In my opinion, the moderator agreement was primarily a tool to protect users. One of the most common reasons (in 2015) for removing active moderators was because they used their position to harm other people on the site. Most often the violation was revealing personal information to the public. Now that also created a legal liability for the company, but the harm to other people in the community was the primary (in my case, only) reason for removing an active moderator.

Which brings me to my concerns about young moderators: I worry that it's harmful to their development as people to have that sort of responsibility. In this, I believe I am wrong. The moderators who I worried were too young have become exceptionally mature. It turns out the sort of people who care deeply about other people enough to step up as moderators can handle that responsibility.²

As with the pronoun affair, I think this shows the company has a fundamental misunderstanding of the community. And when I say "the company" I think I now mean a relatively small subset of employees who haven't taken the time to understand what makes this group of people (and especially those willing to nominate themselves as moderators) so incredibly special.

Now there are other ways to handle minors signing contracts. For instance, you can have them get parental permission. But that's extra work for a company and I can understand why they wouldn't bother. Easier to just exclude people. Only I'm not sure it will. Don't tell anyone, but I found out years ago that children lie about their ages on websites. If they tell the truth, they have learned the site, app or service will be limited. So if there's a checkbox to say you have to be 18, they will check it without thought.

And here's the problem with that: moderation is personal. I don't mean "personal" in the sense of acting on grievances. I mean it takes the whole person to moderate well. Good moderators need to be honest to themselves and others. So starting the relationship off with a lie (even an inconsequential lie about your age) sets up a dangerous pattern. We (the communities of Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow) want our moderators to be open with us. But the checkbox means they can't share their struggles that, say, their parents have unhealthy expectations on where they should go for college.

Look, this is probably a non-event. Most moderators and potential moderators are not in the excluded group. And the few who are will probably be fine carrying on a mild deception. It's just . . . I don't know . . . another thing that I feel has been lost. Stack Overflow is still Stack Overflow when the teen mods are removed. But it's not as diverse or interesting a Stack Overflow as the one I joined years ago.

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Footnote:

1. This is a joke, you see. Stack Overflow is 12, so if it were a person, it couldn't even have an account on itself. The company is even younger.

2. I'm aware there might be survivor bias. People who can't (or have no desire) to handle the responsibility tend to simply step down or step away on their own.

Answer 5

If SE puts the legal concerns in the center here, there is only one conclusion if you continue this line of thought to its conclusion. The major concern is PII, and this is only going to get a more serious issue over time. The current situation, with volunteer mods having access to a lot of PII is simply not very robust against abuse or legal concerns over handling PII.

In the end the moderator agreement is more fiction than a real contract (I'm not a lawyer, so take everything I write now as potentially wrong, misguided or simply hyperbole). SE doesn't actually know the true identity of all mods, the mods are scattered across the globe in various jurisdictions and SE doesn't verify if they are competent to enter contracts. The consequences of violating the moderator agreement extend to the space SE controls, these sites, and no further. And unless a moderator is also violating some major laws in their jurisdiction, the odds that SE would or could enforce any legal claim due to the moderator agreement are vanishingly small.

For every clause except the misuse of PII this is entirely sufficient. The agreement covers how moderators should behave on the sites, and the consequences extend to their privileges on the sites. If you want to be a mod and remain one, you agree to behave in a civilized and decent manner. If you don't do that, you cease being a mod.

Misuse of PII extends to the real world, the consequences no longer confined to our virtual corner here. This is a fundamentally different thing than a moderator misusing their powers here or insulting other users.

If this isn't just some lawyers covering their asses, but a real legal concern I don't think the current actions are enough. You're still granting access to PII to people you don't know, you can't control and probably can't reach if they violate the rules. Thinking this through to the end I don't see any version of this where common moderators still have access to PII. This will always remain a legal risk that is somewhat out of the usual.

The only solution is to create tools that can handle the cases where mods need access to PII without exposing that information to the mods. I know that this is very hard, and takes significant resources. But if SE is actually serious about their legal liability here, I don't see how they have a choice.

Answer 6

I can't help but think out loud that this was never a problem until recently.

Sure, you've had the legally binding trap be an issue for going on ten years now because, well, this was never explicitly enforced or expressly communicated.

Put in another way, it wasn't surfaced as a problem or as a prohibition to someone becoming a moderator.

But now, this is a problem. Something happened that is causing either a moderator or Stack Exchange Inc. to pull rank and keep their moderators legally bound.

I get it; I'm a full blown adult and I know that legally binding contracts are important. But it does kinda overshadow the part about good faith and trust, none of which can be held up in a court of law - which is, again, to be expected.

This wasn't a problem until it became a problem. This is causing me to read between the lines.

Answer 7

This sucks. We have had numerous moderators under the technical age of 18 that have far exceeded the typical maturity of those before 18. Certainly of my own at that age. These are people who I admired for their eloquence and judgment before having any idea of their age, and this humbles me.

I also understand it. We're asking moderators to sign a contract not just for the benefit of Stack Exchange, but also on behalf of all of the people that visit the site. I don't usually read the Terms of Service on sites I visit casually but I would be surprised if I went to a site that did not protect my personal information at least by limiting the access to it by people <18.

I trust the select few moderators of a young age that have done their jobs well here. I also understand the change in policy. I hope the people affected still find a home here and continue to improve our community.

Answer 8

I understand the policy and I know what I say will not satisfy the lawyers you have, but anyway:

As a common sense approach, I think it would be totally fine to require all future moderators to be 18+. Current moderators already have access to PII and have already proven that they won't misuse it. Temporarily removing their diamond until they are 18+ does not provide any value.

That said (and I can feel the lawyers rolling their eyes over my next sentence), the PII the mods have access to is not really the kind of PII I'm losing sleep over. Someone could read my email address? Well... I hate to break it to you, but it's not a secret and even random bots found them half a decade ago.

So yeah... I understand the laws behind it, I understand the lawyers and from that point of view it's absolutely right... but it still sucks to do stuff you don't believe in to make some paper pusher happy.

Answer 9

So after sleeping on it, and listening to what Cat and Yaakov and everyone else has been saying, I was able to gather my thoughts a little more. (Originally posted in Discord.)

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It's kinda funny. To anyone outside of the community (and some within), this seems like perfect sense and shouldn't be a big deal. Why would you trust kids to be moderators and be able to delete people's accounts? It's only when you take into account the long history of under-18s being excellent mods on SE that it becomes clear why people are so upset about such a seemingly unimportant (and logical) thing.

If you say the community can elect their own mods, then the mods elected by the community should be able to be mods. If the legal age to be a user is 13, and any member of the community in good standing can stand for mod, then that should include 13-year-olds in good standing - and has, multiple times, in the past. And look where that got us: A significant section of the mod council, arguably the most influential position a non-staff-member can have on the network.

There has literally never been a PII issue with an under-18 mod; only with adult mods. The mod agreement was never really a legal agreement in the past, and so legal ability to agree to a contract was kinda irrelevant - and even now, it's not like you're collecting info and having mods actually sign a contract in writing. You have no idea who IRL the vast majority of your mods are, which means you can't really litigate against them in court. It seems pointless to be worried about the legal validity of the "contract" in that case because nobody really has legal recourse if that contract is broken.

So when you're saying that under-18s can no longer be mods - despite all the well-liked and respected mods who were elected while under 18 - because legally they can't agree to a contract that doesn't seem to serve any legal purpose, that's what feels like a slap in the face to those of us who spent our teen years moderating and dedicating valuable time and effort to SE.

Answer 10

_{I'm aware of the answer, but I feel that this is worth pointing out explicitly, as this may be a point of confusion for others:}

Why not give under-18 moderators access to most of the site's moderator tools, but prevent them from accessing PII?

Based on the phrasing of this post and the part quoted from Sara in the official policy post, it seems that the primary concern for disallowing minors from becoming moderators is the access to personally identifiable information that they receive as part of their moderator rights.

If that's the case, why not allow under-18 users to serve as moderators and give them most of the tools (including, e.g. binding close/delete voting rights), while preventing them from accessing user PII?

_{The answer: 1. the fact that minors can't legally enter binding contracts including the moderator agreement, 2. that PII may be in other places in moderator space (e.g. the TL, the Team, etc.), and 3. this would be difficult to implement technically. It would be nice if this can be explained in more detail for others to understand.}

Answer 11

Good grief, you'd think moderators were on the payroll or rewarded with merchandise. You'd think that Stack Exchange was the one doing them a favour.

They're not.

But here's the rub, these minors were elected by the community, made up of adults, senior users and veterans alike. Removing any mod who was ⁽¹⁾ legally elected at the time, who did not commit any wrongdoing, who respected all the rules when they were appointed as a moderator is WRONG.

Forced removal will always be wrong, regardless of someone's age, sex, gender, religious or political belief. Once someone has been elected, it's too late to go back and tell the underaged freely-elected moderator "Erm... sorry. After moderating your site for 22 months with no complaints by anyone, you have to be demodded because you are seven months (or 1 year) shy of being 18.”

This is patently stupid.

^{1. The term "legal" was inappropriate. I obviously meant any elected candidate who followed the correct electoral procedure.}

Further thoughts

It seems that no one can state confidently if there are any moderators, who have signed the new moderator agreement, but lied about their ages. However, seeing as the age limit was not included in the new moderator contract, and as of today (Dec 07, 2020) there's still no sign of it, no breach occurred.

The legal shortcoming lies squarely with SE. If, as the community manager is at pains to point out, this is indeed a forward-facing concern, why remove any under-18 year old who was elected months or even years ago? And especially if they signed the updated moderator agreement. These minors have already had access to sensitive information: what has been viewed and done, cannot be unseen nor undone. To expect someone to voluntarily resign when they have not committed any mistake or wrong-doing at the time they signed the agreement, is, very naive.

Answer 12

I don't like this decision

I don't agree with this decision — it will reduce the number of good moderators. I'm not very acknowledged at law, I want to answer about the communities — the people.

This idea will only reduce the number of (ok, pontentially) good moderators on SE. It is harmful and destructive for communities because moderators do one of the most important work — they keep the community free of spam, trolling, unacceptable content and make us feel safe. They are not like government of a community, they just protect StackExchange. The more moderators — the better, we need their help but they are just volunteers, they work in their free time.

What does this mean for existing mods?

Once this policy is live, moderators will see a banner on the site. If they're 18 or older, they can just dismiss the banner and that's all they need to do.

Any moderator who is currently under 18 years of age should email the Community Management team. We'll reach out to them to begin the process of removing their diamond. As mentioned in the policy post, if they're currently under 18, they still have the opportunity to return to moderation once they reach 18 through a simplified moderator reinstatement process.

People invested their time in SE, they spent their time and now they are kicked out from moderation because they are just under 18.

Is this a change to the Moderator Agreement?

This is a new policy but we do not consider it a change to the Moderator Agreement itself, even though we will add the checkbox to affirm that you're 18+ to the Agreement page. As such, we will not be moving to V3 of the Moderator Agreement due to this change.

The checkbox means nothing. Even 3 years old child can tick it. But I'm sure worthy moderators (under 18) will leave. Sigh.

Nothing has changed in that regard - but for the legal reasons outlined in the policy, we can not give them a diamond and access to user PII.

You contradict yourself. If nothing really changed then let him continue being mods.

Strongly agree with @Shog9 but I don't even doubt, you are not going to listen to the community. I feel sorry for it

Answer 13

It's been mentioned that the real reason for this change is the inability of minors to sign binding contracts in some jurisdictions. I've always thought that to be a curious law, and I looked into it a while back.

The inability to hold minors to contracts has nothing to do with preventing them from being held accountable for misbehavior or harm, but is about protecting them from con artists.

The legal principle is based around protecting minors from fast-talking entrepeneurs who would take advantage of their naivete to get them to sign grossly unfair contracts. See, for example, this article, where it is even mentioned that the ability of a minor to avoid a contract is far from absolute. Children's literature is full of examples of such imbalanced contracts, as a warning about the real world.

Stack Exchange is not a con artist looking to convince ignorant children that they can make a lot of money by trading their bicycle away for "rare" baseball cards or a shot at being a movie star.

The fact that a minor didn't "legally" sign a contract does not shield them from the consequences of their misbehavior.

We all remember being children, and all the rules we had to follow. There were rules at home, rules at school, and rules out in the community. We all had to obey them. We could get banned from the mall for violating the "no skateboarding" rule or for using the food court for our birthday parties without asking permission of mall management. We had to get out of the pool during "adult swim" times or face the wrath of the lifeguard. We could get assigned "detention" at school for talking out of turn or for chewing gum in class. For more extreme misbehavior, a minor can be referred to the juvenile justice system ("juvie"), or even sued! One can even use the proverbial birch switch (in certain jurisdictions, check local law).

If a minor can't contract, what can we do with them?

I can't recall a single case in which the existence of a legally-valid contract between Stack Exchange and a user has mattered one bit. Stack Exchange owns the servers that run its software and can take action against misbehaving moderators in the same way that a mall can ban unruly children (or adults, for that matter).

Suppose the feared scenario happens. A kid brings a flash drive filled with Personally Identifying Information (PII) to school and trades it away for bubblegum, pogs, Pokemon, or whatever it is kids are into nowadays. Punish them!

• Take away their moderator diamond.
• Ban them from the site, or even the entire network.
• Call their parents and suggest that the kid be placed on restricted privileges (e.g. no Internet) for a suitably long time.
• Call local police and file a report, requesting that they book the kid on Juvenile Delinquency charges.

What does disaffirming a contract actually mean?

Note the following quote from the HG.org page referenced above:

If a minor voids the contract, he or she must disaffirm the entire contract. The minor cannot pick and choose the provisions of the contract that he or she likes or finds favorable. Additionally, the minor may be required to pay restitution....

What this means is that the terms and conditions of using Stack Exchange are not separable. If a minor wants to "disaffirm" a part of the moderator agreement that they don't like (e.g. the part about not disclosing PII), then they must at a minimum disaffirm the entire moderator agreement, or possibly even the entire Terms of Service of the Stack Exchange network. In the first case, problem solved, the minor can no longer exercise the power of a moderator once they have disaffirmed the entire moderator agreement. The same rule applies to adults - if they state that they no longer intend to follow the agreement, they lose access to user PII and moderator tools. In the second case (the minor has disaffirmed both the Moderator Agreement and the general Terms of Service), the situation is even better - the minor has given themselves a network-wide ban since one can't use the site without agreeing to the Terms of Service.

In response to Catija's comment, I'm not basing this argument on wording or definitions. I'm making a frame challenge, asking why Stack Exchange needs a "legal contract" when so many businesses get along just fine with child patrons. Kids don't have to sign a contract to plug their quarters into arcade games at the mall, to use the playground at the local park, or to order a double chocolate float from their neighborhood ice cream parlor. If a child abuses their opportunities (e.g. uses slugs in the arcade games, spraypaints the playground with graffiti, or spits in the face of the ice cream vendor), they can, and ought to, face appropriate penalties. Penalties can range from a warning, to a ban, all the way to formal placement in a youth behavior modification facility. The presence or lack of a contract has nothing to do with that.

In further response to Catija's comment, I do not believe that Stack Exchange has a hidden motive here. I'm instead arguing that the motive is misguided and suggesting a frame challenge.

Answer 14

In the USA for example, one has to be (in most states):

• 16 to be an employee, for most jobs. [See "Legal working age" for the rest of the world]
• 16 to get married. [See "Marriagable age" for the rest of the world]
• 17 to drive a car with an unrestricted license. [See "List of minimum driving ages"]
• 18 to vote in most elections. [See "Voting age"]
• 19 to purchase cigarettes until many states recently changed it to 21. [See "Smoking age"].
• 21 to purchase alcohol. [See "Legal drinking age"].
• 25 to run for election as a US Representative [See "Age of candidacy"]
• 30 to run for election as a US Sentaror. [See "Age of candidacy"]
• 35 to run for election as President of the country. [See "Age of candidacy"]

I fully appreciate the sentiment of many people here including Shog9's and the eloquent passage by Grace Note that Shog9 thankfully re-posted and that I enjoyed reading. Just as a mature 34-year-old would ideally be allowed to run for President, or an excellent driver at age 15 would ideally be allowed to drive a car, ideally mods would be chosen based on their abilities rather than anything else.

Mithical and others were exceptionally mature at age 14, but I don't in general want 14-year-olds to know my IP address, where I work, which places I'm traveling, where my grandparents might live, etc. In fact I don't I don't want anyone knowing all of that, and neither do you, (but if mods have to have access to PII, I'd rather the mods be allowed to be bound by the moderator contract). It's true that mods have to be elected (though not long ago, many of them were not elected but instead chosen by a very small number of people), but no election process is perfect and thousands of people in this network are not happy with the mods they have (just like millions are not happy with their president or prime minister).

I'm therefore in disagreement with most of you, in that I'm actually in favor of a rule requiring mods to be at least 18, but I want to end by thanking all of our 13-18 year-old mods from over the years, especially those who are being asked to step down right now extra-voluntarily. It's not an easy job at all (at any age).

I think it's also quite noteworthy to highlight how well these 13-18 year olds have done in elections compared to everyone else. Of the 4.66 billion internet users, billions have visited an SE page, over 10 million have registered accounts, but only thousands have run for election, and only hundreds are now moderators (~0.0001% of the SE visitors and ~0.001% of registered users). The vast majority of the 10 million that have registered accounts, are not between 13-18 years old, and 0 of them are between 13-18 forever: So it's quite remarkable that we've had so many of them win elections. Out of the 6 mods/former-mods that Mithical mentioned (including themselves) I think 3 were originally appointed and 3 were elected (please correct me if I'm wrong). While 3 elected mods only constitutes about 1% of the total mods at any given time, the chances of becoming a mod if chosen at random, would be far far far less than 1%.