Design Law 5 — Earned Broadcast
Group message is a privilege, not a default.
Inherits from underspecified-surface.md.
The law
A child cannot broadcast to many other children by default. Broadcast — reaching more than one child at a time with a single message — is a privilege, unlocked by demonstrated quality of prior contribution.
Speech to one child is always free. Speech to many is earned.
Why
Group messaging is where children's platforms turn parasitic. A child with default broadcast access can trigger a cascade — a rumor, an exclusion, a pile-on, a chain-message — across dozens of peers in seconds. The damage is done before any adult sees it. The child who triggered the cascade often did not fully intend the harm; the platform simply gave them the capability with no threshold.
The village refuses to hand a child a megaphone as a default. Megaphones are earned by the demonstrated ability to use them well.
How broadcast is earned
Credit from Law 4 (Service and Evidence) is the currency. As a child accumulates credit through evidenced acts of service, broadcast privileges unlock in stages.
- Stage 0 — Direct only. The default. The child can speak to one child at a time, at a place, in the village.
- Stage 1 — Small group. After sustained evidence of service, the child can address the small group present at their current place. Speech is scoped to who is standing where they are standing.
- Stage 2 — Named group. The child can address a named group they belong to (a class, a study group, a friend cluster) with a message, when the message content itself is calibrated as worth the broadcast.
- Stage 3 — Village-wide. Rare. A child at Stage 3 can post something that appears to everyone in their bubble. This is not a right; it is a standing that has been earned and can be lost.
Loss of standing works the same way it was earned — through the community's response. A message that generates confirmed complaints, or that triggers harm the community has to repair, steps the child down. Not as punishment. As calibration.
What the child sees
The child sees which stage they are at. They see what unlocks the next stage — not as a checklist, but as a shape they can perceive: more evidenced service, weighted by who was helped, over time, produces standing. The system is legible without being gamified into a leaderboard.
The child does not see other children's stages as public ranks. Stage is visible to the child themselves and to the adults responsible for them. Peers perceive stage indirectly, through what actually happens when a child speaks.
Message calibration
At Stages 2 and 3, the platform applies a light calibration before a message reaches the group. Not censorship — calibration. The village asks: is this message worth the broadcast the child has earned? A voice note describing a shared plan for a real-world act of service passes cleanly. A rumor about another child does not.
Calibration is done by the community layer — the adults who steward the village, with the technical assistance of the platform. Not by an algorithm operating alone.
What this refuses
- It refuses to give children default megaphones.
- It refuses to make broadcast frictionless.
- It refuses to display broadcast stage as a public rank.
- It refuses to reward broadcast for its own sake.
- It refuses to let algorithm-only calibration decide what a child broadcasts.
What this commits to
- Speech to one is always free.
- Speech to many is earned through evidenced service.
- The community stewards the calibration layer.
- Standing can be gained and lost. It is not a permanent status.
The generational stake
Children formed on the village grow up understanding that reaching many people at once is a responsibility that they earn by demonstrating they can use it well. That understanding is what functional societies require of adults with platforms; it is what the current substrate refuses to teach because teaching it would reduce engagement.
The village teaches it as a design law.
Pour le bien-être du peuple.
© 2026 Dany Theriault. EVE “digital stem cell” glyph and glyph-based design principles — all rights reserved. Stewardship of rights of use and assignment for large public and institutional usage rests with the Pacific Utilities Design Council. Published as a time-stamped record of authorship and intent.
pour le bien-être du peuple