The passing of Brazil’s Digital Statute of the Child and Adolescent (Digital ECA; Law No. 15,211/2025) marks a milestone in the country’s digital legislation. The law aims to build a digital ecosystem that prioritizes the best interests of children and adolescents. As the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) invited comments on a new public consultation, this time on the operational guidelines for providers of information technology products or services for this law, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Brasil participated. Our goal was for the law to continue to enable participation in open knowledge and to prevent community-led platforms from being sidelined by regulations designed to address issues arising from the designs of commercial platforms.
This public consultation aimed to update preliminary guidelines on this topic—published by the ANPD in March 2026 (available here in Portuguese)—with the goal of providing general instructions regarding the implementation of reliable age verification mechanisms by providers of information technology products and/or services that are either intended for minors or likely to be accessed by them. Establishing basic requirements for age verification enables providers to fulfill their obligations in a manner consistent with the principle of comprehensive protection of children and adolescents in the law.
In our joint submission, we highlight a key distinction that the regulator must make in providing these guidelines: There is a significant difference between commercial, algorithm-driven social media platforms and digital public goods (DPGs) that serve the public interest and are not-for-profit, such as Wikipedia.
Why participation was important
ECA Digital introduces strict compliance standards to protect children and adolescents online. While these objectives are highly laudable, the subsequent guidelines issued by the ANPD must be applied proportionately so as to not negatively impact the online information ecosystem.
According to the draft guidelines, certain broad categories of services, including those categorized as social media, face strict operational requirements—for instance, the obligation to link the accounts of users under the age of 16 to a legal guardian and a total ban on behavioral profiling for advertising purposes. Given that Wikipedia relies on a global, decentralized community of over 265,000 volunteer contributors, including 8,000 to 9,000 active contributors every month in the Portuguese language version of the encyclopedia alone, subjecting an open educational ecosystem to a one-size-fits-all compliance model could inadvertently disrupt, censor, or undermine its community-led governance. Participating in this consultation was important to safeguard the fundamental right of access to reliable information and to ensure that platforms posing a low risk to child rights, such as Wikipedia, remain open and freely accessible to the Brazilian population.
As we emphasized in our submission, the efficacy of the Digital ECA relies entirely on the precision of its implementation. To achieve this, the ANPD must recognize the profound architectural and motivational differences between for-profit, algorithmically-driven social media and nonprofit, community-governed DPGs.
Key points of our submission
Our joint submission focused on three recommendations for improving the draft guidelines so that they more accurately reflect the technological, commercial, and public interest realities of the Internet. We recommended that the ANPD:
1. Clarify the definition of social media
The current definition of social media in the draft guidelines is rather broad: it encompasses any application whose primary purpose is enabling users to disseminate information through connected accounts. Since open-source software repositories, citizen science portals, and collaborative encyclopedias use accounts to track changes and facilitate discussions about content accuracy, they risk being misclassified.
We therefore urged the ANPD to explicitly define what does not constitute social media. To this end, we highlight three fundamental attributes that distinguish Wikipedia from commercial platforms:
- Neutral point of view (NPOV) versus personal opinions: Social media platforms are designed to amplify personal opinions and everyday social interactions. In contrast, Wikipedia strictly prohibits personal opinions and requires that all contributions adhere to the norms of a neutral point of view and verifiability.
- Intentional access versus algorithmic viralization: Unlike commercial social media platforms, which use opaque algorithms to maximize user engagement and boost content virality, Wikimedia provides the same information to all users, without the influence of predictive algorithms.
- Absence of monetization: The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates exclusively as a nonprofit organization funded primarily by small individual donations, does not collect or monetize data from Wikipedia contributors or readers for advertising purposes, eliminating the commercial incentive to deploy manipulative design elements or addictive design loops.
2. Avoid the “legal presumption” trap
The draft guidelines establish a legal presumption that certain categories of online intermediaries, including social media, are directed at or accessed by minors, automatically subjecting them to all legal obligations, regardless of their actual risk profile.
In our comments, we highlighted how this creates a regulatory paradox. If Wikipedia were mistakenly classified as social media, it would bypass the guideline’s own nuanced, risk-based probable access test. This test is established by the ANPD itself in their draft guidance and stipulates that the “probable access” of a certain product or service online occurs only when the concurrent presence of three elements is identified, according to ECA Digital’s Article 1: A) probable use and attractiveness of the item; B) ease of access and use; and C) systemic risk to the privacy, safety or development of minors.
In this sense, even if a platform were to demonstrate that it lacks systemic risk (due to the absence of private messaging or commercial data tracking), for instance, because it is considered a social media platform, this classification would still require it to implement intrusive age verification mechanisms or data-intensive tracking, which are fundamentally incompatible with its open-source, public architecture.
3. Create a specific regulatory framework for DPGs
To guide policymakers, we shared the “Wikipedia Test” framework with ANPD, a public policy tool designed to check whether regulations inadvertently hinder people’s ability to read, contribute to, or trust open knowledge projects. Forcing volunteer-led communities to implement heavy, centralized compliance systems fails this test—that is to say, not only it is likely to inadvertently hurt Wikipedia, but also to unintentionally hurt a number of other community-led websites, open resources, or digital infrastructure hosted in the public interest.
As noted in the Foundation’s independent Child Rights Impact Assessment report, published in 2024, Wikimedia projects present an inherently lower risk profile. Because the platform lacks private messaging, predatory behavior cannot occur privately—all communications are publicly visible and permanently archived. Furthermore, community-led mechanisms quickly remove the few instances of harmful material using advanced technical tools such as PhotoDNA. That is why we requested that the ANPD formally recognize DPGs and place them at the lowest regulatory “tier” of intervention, matching the guide’s own principle of proportionality.
Looking ahead
The ECA Digital represents a valuable opportunity for the Brazilian government to protect children and adolescents from abusive business practices while fostering a diverse and dynamic online information ecosystem. By refining these guidelines to exclude educational platforms and ensure that legal definitions do not inadvertently include low-risk providers, the ANPD can craft a text that could serve as a global standard for proportionate, risk-based internet regulation, protecting both freedom of expression and public interest, community-led online collaboration.
For more details, you can read our complete submissions to the ANPD’s public consultations in English and in Portuguese.
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