This talk is part of the TrustCon 2024 Child Safety Lightning Talk session. Lightning talk sessions are 50 minutes long, featuring a series of short 5-7 minute talks back-to-back in the same room, followed by Q&A at the end.

When moderators are enforcing policies related to child protection, it can be challenging to accurately determine the age of an individual featured in an image or video due to cultural differences, lack of clear visual guidelines, AI-manipulation, or other such reasons. This can lead to either under or overenforcement of child safety policies for certain platforms, content types, and/or regions. This session will share best practices developed through a working group on Age Determination with Thorn, the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, Aylo, Teleperformance and other key stakeholders. Specifically, this session will discuss:

1. The role of technology and human review to make appropriate age determinations
2. Best practices for training, policy development, and enforcement guidance provided to moderators
3. Trends observed that pose challenges to appropriate age determination and suggestions for mitigation