This week, a new company used the old “safety is extremely important” expression after an incident that says otherwise. The CEO of Bluesky, quickly emerging as a popular X alternative, misstated the app’s minimum user age.

When Jay Graber was asked for the minimum age on Bluesky, she said, “When you sign up—I’ll have to check—I think it’s like 18 and above." That is not correct. She’s right that the app asks for a birthdate on the signup screen, but when I entered 2012 as my birth year, a message popped up about age 13, shown here. Here’s how the company responded, according to a BBC report:

Following the interview, Bluesky contacted the BBC to clarify that the minimum age is 13, not 18. A spokesperson said: "Child safety is extremely important for Bluesky. You must be at least 13 years old to sign up for an account, and anyone under 18 using Bluesky has additional settings applied to ensure that the content they see is safe for minors."

In a wide-ranging interview with presenter Rick Edwards, she [Graber] said Bluesky does not try to verify the identification of the user, to ensure people are not lying when signing up.

She said: "We don’t take IDs or anything like that. I know that’s proposed in some places. That’s very private information. I think companies like us would want to make sure we're handling that private user data very responsibly."

Framing verification as a privacy issue is a compelling argument but might contradict Bluesky’s knowledge of those between 13 and 18. What technology do they use to determine that age range? On a recent podcast episode, Scott Galloway asked Google Founder Eric Schmidt whether companies should practice “age gating”:

They should. And indeed Jonathan's [Haidt] work is incredible. He and I wrote an article together two years ago which called for a number of things in the area of regulating social media and we'd start with changing a law called COPA from 13 to 16. And we are quite convinced that using various techniques we can determine the age of the person with a little bit of work. And so people say, well you can't implement it. Well that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. And so we believe that at least the pernicious effects of this technology on below 16 can be addressed.

Schmidt recommends 16 as the minimum, and students might discuss whether Bluesky should change its policy. They also can discuss what the spokesperson could have said differently. One option is to omit that safety cliché entirely. It was an unfortunate mistake the CEO won’t likely make again—and a signal for the company to pay more attention to concerns about users’ age.