← SHOW for Platforms

Young people are still finding their way onto your platform. Give them a safe front door.

SHOW for Platforms — a plain-language guide for platform providers

Age bans are being enforced through you, with heavy penalties when a determined young person gets through. Meanwhile, those young people are tech-literate, and many are already getting around the blocks.

SHOW for Platforms offers a way to protect young users that you can actually stand behind — and prove.

What it is

An open, four-axis content rating — Spice, Heat, OMG and WTF — attached to every item you serve. Parents set a ceiling for their child. Content above it isn't served.

It's free. No licence fee, no permission needed.

Why it fits what you already run

You already have most of the parts:

• Content scanning — your existing classifiers for nudity, violence and distress map onto the four SHOW axes.
• Family controls — your current parent dashboards hold the ceiling setting.
• Maturity labels — you don't have to rebuild them. Map your existing content labels and maturity settings onto SHOW values, publish your mapping to r8rly.org, and the audit checks it produces accurate SHOW values.

What you add:

1. A SHOW metadata field on each item, displayed as SHOW S1·H0·O2·W3
2. One rule in your serving logic: above the ceiling on any axis, don't serve it
3. A ceiling setting in your family controls
4. Automatic flags for self-harm or disordered-eating promotion, dangerous challenges, bullying, scams and gambling — gambling gated to the legal age of each viewer's country
5. Safe youth defaults: no DMs from unconnected adults, location off, limited livestreaming

Roll it out in phases:

• Phase 1 (core): public content surfaces, new uploads, youth accounts, ads, flags and youth defaults
• Phase 2: comments and back-rating existing content
• Phase 3: livestreams — the streamer declares a rating before going live, and a stream found above a young viewer's ceiling is age-gated for that viewer with a warning

Private one-to-one and ephemeral messaging is out of scope. While a phase is rolling out, unrated content falls back to your existing teen content settings; once the phase is complete, unrated content in its scope is hidden from youth accounts.

What it does for you

• Meets duties you already have. It supports eSafety's Phase 2 industry codes in Australia, the EU Digital Services Act's protection-of-minors and independent-audit requirements, and the UK Online Safety Act's children's safety duties.
• Gives you proof. Independent audit turns "we take safety seriously" into a certification listed on a public register.
• Opens a policy path. In Australia, youth services certified against SHOW are put to government as a proposed class of service for exemption under the social media minimum age rules.
• Turns engagement into education — if you choose. The Learning Dividend is a separate, optional module, not a condition of certification. Through it, verified curriculum content gets priority in youth feeds, creators of it are paid from a platform-funded education pool, and a share reaches local school regions. No advertising to children funds it.

How certification works

• r8rly.org is the governing body for the SHOW Standard. It publishes the standard, the platform addendum and the SHOW audit criteria so every certifier tests the same way. It does not certify or audit.
• Independent certification bodies certify. They take you on as a client, run the audit at their own cost and risk, carry their own liability and insurance, and hold their own accreditation (for example to ISO/IEC 17065, through JAS-ANZ in Australia).
• They check label accuracy, flag accuracy, gate integrity and youth defaults by blind sampling and live testing.
• You pay the certification body for the audit. Certification bodies pay r8rly.org a licence fee to use the SHOW Certified™ mark, and part of that income funds an open youth-learning catalogue and community education programs.
• The certification body delivers the full audit report to you and the relevant regulator, and you have a right of reply before it is finalised.
• The certification body notifies r8rly.org of your status, and r8rly.org lists certification status only — certified or not certified, and the date — on a public register.
• Certification is not an admission of liability, and audit findings are given under the agreed audit terms.

Getting started

r8rly.org is taking SHOW for Platforms to regulators first — a submission to eSafety, then engagement with the European Commission under the Digital Services Act — before an Australian pilot with one platform and one independent certification body.

1. Read the full SHOW for Platforms addendum and integration guide at r8rly.org.
2. Map your existing classifiers, content labels and maturity settings to the four SHOW axes.
3. Talk to r8rly.org about joining the Australian pilot.

SHOW for Platforms · r8rly.org · The SHOW Standard is free and open under CC BY-SA 4.0 · SHOW Certified™ is a mark of r8rly.org