Social media age verification laws in the United States

Social media age verification laws in the United States

In the United States, age verification laws for social media are ostensibly designed to limit young people's access to content deemed problematic such as pornography and to reduce the negative impact of social media on the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents. The purpose and effects of such laws are highly contested. Critics say that these laws suppress free speech by removing online anonymity. They have also stated the laws undermine safety, even for children, by increasing the exposure of user data to breaches, many sites require government IDs and biometric data (such as photographs), often transmitted or secured insecurely and without encryption. They also note that the measures are easily circumvented with VPNs, prompting some states such as Michigan and Wisconsin to propose legislation banning VPNs. == Laws == Many state legislatures have considered or enacted legislation pertaining to young people and social media. In 2022, California passed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (AB 2273) requiring websites that are likely to be used by minors to estimate visitors' ages. On March 23, 2023, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed SB 152 and HB 311, collectively known as the Utah Social Media Regulation Act, which requires age verification; if a user is under 18, they have to get parental consent before making an account on any social media platform. Few laws have gone into effect partially due to court challenges. === Arkansas === On April 11, 2023, Arkansas enacted SB 396, the Social Media Safety Act. The law requires certain social media companies that make over $100 million per year to verify the age of new users using a third party, and to obtain parental consent for users under 18. It excludes social media companies that allow a user to generate short video clips as well as games. The law was set to go in effect in September 2023. On June 29, 2023, NetChoice sued the Attorney General of Arkansas Tim Griffin in The Western District Court of Arkansas to block enforcement of the law, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). On July 7, 2023, NetChoice filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the law. On July 27, Griffin and Tony Allen filed briefs in opposition to the preliminary injunction. The preliminary injunction was granted by Judge Timothy L. Brooks on August 31, reasoning that the law was too vague, that NetChoice's members will suffer irreparable harm if the act goes into effect, and that age restrictions were ineffective. === California === ==== Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) ==== On October 13, 2025, Gavin Newsom signed the Digital Age Assurance Act into law, which requires operating system providers to estimate the age of a user and into 4 age categories: Under 13 13 - 15 16 - 17 18 and over It comes into force on January 1, 2027. ==== California Age-Appropriate Design Code (AB 2273) ==== On September 15, 2022, California enacted AB 2273, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act. Its most controversial provisions required online services that are likely to be used by those under 18 to estimate the age of child users with a "reasonable level of certainty". It also required these services to file Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) certifying whether an online product, service, or feature could harm children, including by exposing them to (potentially) harmful content. The law does not define harmful content. Before the law took effect, EFF sent a veto request to Newsom. On December 14, 2022, NetChoice sued. On September 18, 2023, Federal Judge Beth Labson Freeman granted a preliminary injunction. The 9th Circuit on August 16, 2024, affirmed the injunction against the DPIA section of the law and sent the rest back, because the argument in the 9th circuit was mainly focused on the DPIA. ==== Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act (SB 976) ==== On September 20, 2024, California enacted SB 976, Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction. The law requires online platforms to exclude those under 18 from "addictive" feeds unless parental consent is given. It requires online platforms to not send notifications to someone under 18 between 12:00 AM and 6:00 AM without parental consent or between 8:00 am – 3:00 pm without parental consent from September through May (the law does not define what a "notification" is). The law took effect on January 1, 2025, with age verification required as of December 31, 2026. On November 12, NetChoice sued in the Northern District and before Judge Edward John Davila. On December 31, the judge blocked the sections of SB 976 that required time-of-day restrictions. He also enjoined requirements to report on the number of minor users as well as the number of parental assents to access an addictive feed. He did not block the age assurance requirement or blocking minors from seeing addictive feeds without parental consent. His reasoning was that age assurance that runs in the background does not restrict adult access to speech and that regulating feeds does not violate the first amendment because it was content neutral and did not remove any content. On January 1, 2025, NetChoice filed a motion to fully block the law as part of its appeal to the Ninth Circuit. NetChoice claimed that the court erred in its reading of Supreme Court case Moody v. NetChoice by mainly focusing on the concurring opinions and not the deciding opinion. The same day Davila decreed that California's response to NetChoice was due by 11:59 pm. California responded the same day to NetChoice's motion, claiming that the court should not block the full law, claiming that NetChoice had misread Moody v. NetChoice and that NetChoice's members would not likely face any harm from the act because members such as X (formerly Twitter) already offer their members feeds that were not personalized. On January 2, Davila granted NetChoice's motion to block the full law during the appeals process by delaying the effective date of the law from January 1, 2025, to February 1, 2025. That day NetChoice appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. === Florida === On January 5, 2024, Tyler Sirois introduced HB 1, which would ban anyone under 16 from using any social media platform and would require platforms to verify the age of users. After the bill passed, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published a blog post opposing the bill for violating the rights of minors and adults. The bill was vetoed by Governor Ron DeSantis on March 1, 2024, claiming that the State Legislature was going to enact a better alternative. HB 3 then decreased the minimum age from 16 to 14, allowing minors aged 14 and 15 to make social media accounts with parental consent. Florida enacted it on March 25, 2024, and took effect on January 1, 2025. A surge of 1,150% in VPN demand in Florida was detected after the law took effect. VPN services provide the ability to circumvent the law. On October 28, 2024, NetChoice and Computer and Communications Industry Association sued. The Judge is Chief Judge Mark E. Walker. On February 28, 2025, arguments were heard on the motion for a preliminary injunction. Walker seemed skeptical of Florida's argument that the law did not violate the first amendment and said the State would have a hard time to justify a complete ban of youth under 14 from social media. On March 13, Walker denied the motion for a preliminary injunction because the plaintiffs had not proven that at least one of their members had at least 10 percent of their users under 16 use their platform for at least 2 hours per day. Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint and a renewed motion for a preliminary injunction which was granted on June 3, for failing First Amendment Intermediate scrutiny. The injunction left in force the provision that allowed parents to request termination of their child's social media account. === Georgia === On April 23, 2024, Georgia enacted SB 351, which became Act 463. Act 463 requires platforms to verify the age of users of social media platforms and require users under 16 years of age to have parental consent before creating an account. It also requires schools to ban all social media platforms, including YouTube. Before the law was signed NetChoice sent a veto request to Kemp claiming the law was unconstitutional and was bad policy. After the bill was enacted, ACLU and NetChoice criticized the bill. NetChoice sued two months before the law's effective date. The Judge is Amy Totenberg. the suit claims that the law violates the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendments. === Louisiana === ==== Secure Online Child Interaction and Age Limitation Act (SB 162) ==== On June 28, 2023, Louisiana enacted SB 162, the Secure Online Child Interaction and Age Limitation Act. It requires social media platforms to verify user age and get parental consent for users under 16, prohibits account holders under 1

Clips (software)

Clips is a discontinued mobile video editing software application created by Apple Inc. It was released onto the iOS App Store on April 6, 2017, for free. Initially, it was only available on 64-bit devices running iOS 10.3 or later; as of version 3.1.3, it requires iOS 16.0 or later. Apple describes it as an app for "making and sharing fun videos with text, effects, graphics, and more.". Its final release was on May 9, 2024 before was removed from the App Store on October 10, 2025. == Features == After launching of the app, the user sees the view of the front-facing camera. The app allows the user to create a new clip by tapping on a red record button, or use photos or videos from the device's photo library. Once a clip is recorded, it can be added to a project timeline shown at the bottom of the screen. The user can share their project on social media platforms. The user can also add filters and effects to the project. "Live Titles" (available in several styles) can also be created by dictating to the device.

Relational data mining

Relational data mining is the data mining technique for relational databases. Unlike traditional data mining algorithms, which look for patterns in a single table (propositional patterns), relational data mining algorithms look for patterns among multiple tables (relational patterns). For most types of propositional patterns, there are corresponding relational patterns. For example, there are relational classification rules (relational classification), relational regression tree, and relational association rules. There are several approaches to relational data mining: Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) Graph Mining Propositionalization Multi-view learning == Algorithms == Multi-Relation Association Rules: Multi-Relation Association Rules (MRAR) is a new class of association rules which in contrast to primitive, simple and even multi-relational association rules (that are usually extracted from multi-relational databases), each rule item consists of one entity but several relations. These relations indicate indirect relationship between the entities. Consider the following MRAR where the first item consists of three relations live in, nearby and humid: “Those who live in a place which is near by a city with humid climate type and also are younger than 20 -> their health condition is good”. Such association rules are extractable from RDBMS data or semantic web data. == Software == Safarii: a Data Mining environment for analysing large relational databases based on a multi-relational data mining engine. Dataconda: a software, free for research and teaching purposes, that helps mining relational databases without the use of SQL. == Datasets == Relational dataset repository: a collection of publicly available relational datasets.

Universal psychometrics

Universal psychometrics encompasses psychometrics instruments that could measure the psychological properties of any intelligent agent. Up until the early 21st century, psychometrics relied heavily on psychological tests that require the subject to cooperate and answer questions, the most famous example being an intelligence test. Such methods are only applicable to the measurement of human psychological properties. As a result, some researchers have proposed the idea of universal psychometrics - they suggest developing testing methods that allow for the measurement of non-human entities' psychological properties. For example, it has been suggested that the Turing test is a form of universal psychometrics. This test involves having testers (without any foreknowledge) attempt to distinguish a human from a machine by interacting with both (while not being to see either individuals). It is supposed that if the machine is equally intelligent to a human, the testers will not be able to distinguish between the two, i.e., their guesses will not be better than chance. Thus, Turing test could measure the intelligence (a psychological variable) of an AI. Other instruments proposed for universal psychometrics include reinforcement learning and measuring the ability to predict complexity.

Leakage (machine learning)

In statistics and machine learning, leakage (also known as data leakage or target leakage) refers to the use of information during model training that would not be available at prediction time. This results in overly optimistic performance estimates, as the model appears to perform better during evaluation than it actually would in a production environment. Leakage is often subtle and indirect, making it difficult to detect and eliminate. It can lead a statistician or modeler to select a suboptimal model, which may be outperformed by a leakage-free alternative. == Leakage modes == Leakage can occur at multiple stages of the machine learning workflow. Broadly, its sources can be divided into two categories: those arising from features and those arising from training examples. === Feature leakage === Feature or column-wise leakage is caused by the inclusion of columns which are one of the following: a duplicate label, a proxy for the label, or the label itself. These features, known as anachronisms, will not be available when the model is used for predictions, and result in leakage if included when the model is trained. For example, including a "MonthlySalary" column when predicting "YearlySalary"; or "MinutesLate" when predicting "IsLate". === Training example leakage === Row-wise leakage is caused by improper sharing of information between rows of data. Types of row-wise leakage include: Premature featurization; leaking from premature featurization before Cross-validation/Train/Test split (must fit MinMax/ngrams/etc on only the train split, then transform the test set) Duplicate rows between train/validation/test (for example, oversampling a dataset to pad its size before splitting; or, different rotations/augmentations of a single image; bootstrap sampling before splitting; or duplicating rows to up sample the minority class) Non-independent and identically distributed random (non-IID) data Time leakage (for example, splitting a time-series dataset randomly instead of newer data in test set using a train/test split or rolling-origin cross-validation) Group leakage—not including a grouping split column (for example, Andrew Ng's group had 100k x-rays of 30k patients, meaning ~3 images per patient. The paper used random splitting instead of ensuring that all images of a patient were in the same split. Hence the model partially memorized the patients instead of learning to recognize pneumonia in chest x-rays.) A 2023 review found data leakage to be "a widespread failure mode in machine-learning (ML)-based science", having affected at least 294 academic publications across 17 disciplines, and causing a potential reproducibility crisis. == Detection == Data leakage in machine learning can be detected through various methods, focusing on performance analysis, feature examination, data auditing, and model behavior analysis. Performance-wise, unusually high accuracy or significant discrepancies between training and test results often indicate leakage. Inconsistent cross-validation outcomes may also signal issues. Feature examination involves scrutinizing feature importance rankings and ensuring temporal integrity in time series data. A thorough audit of the data pipeline is crucial, reviewing pre-processing steps, feature engineering, and data splitting processes. Detecting duplicate entries across dataset splits is also important. For language models, the Min-K% method can detect the presence of data in a pretraining dataset. It presents a sentence suspected to be present in the pretraining dataset, and computes the log-likelihood of each token, then compute the average of the lowest K of these. If this exceeds a threshold, then the sentence is likely present. This method is improved by comparing against a baseline of the mean and variance. Analyzing model behavior can reveal leakage. Models relying heavily on counter-intuitive features or showing unexpected prediction patterns warrant investigation. Performance degradation over time when tested on new data may suggest earlier inflated metrics due to leakage. Advanced techniques include backward feature elimination, where suspicious features are temporarily removed to observe performance changes. Using a separate hold-out dataset for final validation before deployment is advisable.

The Drivers Cooperative

The Drivers Cooperative or Co-Op Ride is an American ridesharing company and mobile app that is a workers cooperative, owned collectively by the drivers. The cooperative launched in May 2021 in New York City, with the first 2,500 drivers issued their ownership certificates in a media event. The cooperative was co-founded by Grenadan immigrant and for hire vehicle driver Ken Lewis, labor organizer Erik Forman, and former Uber executive Alissa Orlando. Mohammad Hossen is the first member of the drivers' advisory board, which they plan to expand democratically as more drivers are onboarded. Other staff include software and industry veterans and in addition to co-founder Lewis, there are other drivers in management roles such as ex-driver and organizer David Alexis. The Co-Op Ride app is on the iOS and Android platforms and is built on Google Maps, Stripe, and Waze. By July, the app had been downloaded by 30,000 users and the number of drivers increased to 3,400, and by August there were 40,000 users. The cooperative is owned by the drivers themselves, and takes 15% from each ride for business overhead costs, as opposed to the 25% to 40% ride hail apps like Uber or Lyft take per ride. While being ultimately owned by the driver members, not by investors, the cooperative began with seed money from the Minnesota-based Community Development Financial Institution Shared Capital Cooperative, the local Lower East Side People's Federal Credit Union, and welcomed individual donations via crowdfunding in the form of revenue sharing debt on Wefunder. Each driver is a member of the cooperative and owns one share of the company and one vote in business and leadership decisions. In addition to a larger percentage of the fees per ride driven, each driver as a part-owner will also receive a share of the company's profits after loans and other expenses are paid, in the form of weighted dividends. The drivers use their own cars. The cooperative vets its owner-members further than what is already performed by the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), and gives a fixed price when a car is ordered and does not engage in surge pricing. The TLC imposed a minimum payrate for mobile app ridesharing companies operating in New York city in 2018. In 2021 that is $1.26 per mile which Uber and Lyft do not pay above; the cooperative pays a minimum mileage of $1.64. The cooperative intends to be able to set aside 10% of profits to community foundations and other non-profits and community organizations. The cooperative has engaged in advocacy around a policy agenda voted on by its members. Legislation to achieve this policy goal was introduced by State Senator Julia Salazar and Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas, with the support of a coalition led by The Drivers Cooperative, United Auto Workers Region 9 and 9A, Sunrise Movement, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, and New York Communities for Change.

Rademacher complexity

In computational learning theory (machine learning and theory of computation), Rademacher complexity, named after Hans Rademacher, measures richness of a class of sets with respect to a probability distribution. The concept can also be extended to real valued functions. == Definitions == === Rademacher complexity of a set === Given a set A ⊆ R m {\displaystyle A\subseteq \mathbb {R} ^{m}} , the Rademacher complexity of A is defined as follows: Rad ⁡ ( A ) := 1 m E σ [ sup a ∈ A ∑ i = 1 m σ i a i ] {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} (A):={\frac {1}{m}}\mathbb {E} _{\sigma }\left[\sup _{a\in A}\sum _{i=1}^{m}\sigma _{i}a_{i}\right]} where σ 1 , σ 2 , … , σ m {\displaystyle \sigma _{1},\sigma _{2},\dots ,\sigma _{m}} are independent random variables drawn from the Rademacher distribution i.e. Pr ( σ i = + 1 ) = Pr ( σ i = − 1 ) = 1 / 2 {\displaystyle \Pr(\sigma _{i}=+1)=\Pr(\sigma _{i}=-1)=1/2} for i ∈ { 1 , 2 , … , m } {\displaystyle i\in \{1,2,\dots ,m\}} , and a = ( a 1 , … , a m ) ∈ A {\displaystyle a=(a_{1},\ldots ,a_{m})\in A} . Some authors take the absolute value of the sum before taking the supremum, but if A {\displaystyle A} is symmetric this makes no difference. === Rademacher complexity of a function class === Let S = { z 1 , z 2 , … , z m } ⊆ Z {\displaystyle S=\{z_{1},z_{2},\dots ,z_{m}\}\subseteq Z} be a sample of points and consider a function class F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} of real-valued functions over Z {\displaystyle Z} . Then, the empirical Rademacher complexity of F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} given S {\displaystyle S} is defined as: Rad S ⁡ ( F ) = 1 m E σ [ sup f ∈ F | ∑ i = 1 m σ i f ( z i ) | ] {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} _{S}({\mathcal {F}})={\frac {1}{m}}\mathbb {E} _{\sigma }\left[\sup _{f\in {\mathcal {F}}}\left|\sum _{i=1}^{m}\sigma _{i}f(z_{i})\right|\right]} This can also be written using the previous definition: Rad S ⁡ ( F ) = Rad ⁡ ( F ∘ S ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} _{S}({\mathcal {F}})=\operatorname {Rad} ({\mathcal {F}}\circ S)} where F ∘ S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}\circ S} denotes function composition, i.e.: F ∘ S := { ( f ( z 1 ) , … , f ( z m ) ) ∣ f ∈ F } {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}\circ S:=\{(f(z_{1}),\ldots ,f(z_{m}))\mid f\in {\mathcal {F}}\}} The worst case empirical Rademacher complexity is Rad ¯ m ( F ) = sup S = { z 1 , … , z m } Rad S ⁡ ( F ) {\displaystyle {\overline {\operatorname {Rad} }}_{m}({\mathcal {F}})=\sup _{S=\{z_{1},\dots ,z_{m}\}}\operatorname {Rad} _{S}({\mathcal {F}})} Let P {\displaystyle P} be a probability distribution over Z {\displaystyle Z} . The Rademacher complexity of the function class F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} with respect to P {\displaystyle P} for sample size m {\displaystyle m} is: Rad P , m ⁡ ( F ) := E S ∼ P m [ Rad S ⁡ ( F ) ] {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} _{P,m}({\mathcal {F}}):=\mathbb {E} _{S\sim P^{m}}\left[\operatorname {Rad} _{S}({\mathcal {F}})\right]} where the above expectation is taken over an identically independently distributed (i.i.d.) sample S = ( z 1 , z 2 , … , z m ) {\displaystyle S=(z_{1},z_{2},\dots ,z_{m})} generated according to P {\displaystyle P} . == Intuition == The Rademacher complexity is typically applied on a function class of models that are used for classification, with the goal of measuring their ability to classify points drawn from a probability space under arbitrary labellings. When the function class is rich enough, it contains functions that can appropriately adapt for each arrangement of labels, simulated by the random draw of σ i {\displaystyle \sigma _{i}} under the expectation, so that this quantity in the sum is maximized. The Rademacher complexity of a set A {\displaystyle A} can be rewritten as Rad ⁡ ( A ) := 1 m E σ [ sup a ∈ A ∑ i = 1 m σ i a i ] = 1 m 2 m ∑ σ ∈ { − 1 / m , + 1 / m } m [ sup a ∈ A ⟨ σ , a ⟩ ] . {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} (A):={\frac {1}{m}}\mathbb {E} _{\sigma }\left[\sup _{a\in A}\sum _{i=1}^{m}\sigma _{i}a_{i}\right]={\frac {1}{{\sqrt {m}}2^{m}}}\sum _{\sigma \in \{-1/{\sqrt {m}},+1/{\sqrt {m}}\}^{m}}\left[\sup _{a\in A}\langle \sigma ,a\rangle \right].} Each term in the summation is the farthest distance of the set A {\displaystyle A} from the origin, along a unit-length direction σ {\displaystyle \sigma } . The directions are along the vertices of a hypercube. Thus, we can also write it as Rad ⁡ ( A ) = 1 2 m 1 2 m − 1 ∑ σ ∈ { − 1 / m , + 1 / m } m / { − 1 , + 1 } [ sup a ∈ A ⟨ σ , a ⟩ − inf a ∈ A ⟨ σ , a ⟩ ] {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} (A)={\frac {1}{2{\sqrt {m}}}}{\frac {1}{2^{m-1}}}\sum _{\sigma \in \{-1/{\sqrt {m}},+1/{\sqrt {m}}\}^{m}/\{-1,+1\}}\left[\sup _{a\in A}\langle \sigma ,a\rangle -\inf _{a\in A}\langle \sigma ,a\rangle \right]} Here, the set { − 1 / m , + 1 / m } m / { − 1 , + 1 } {\displaystyle \{-1/{\sqrt {m}},+1/{\sqrt {m}}\}^{m}/\{-1,+1\}} denotes half of the vertices of a hypercube, selected so that each diagonal has exactly one vertex selected. In words, this states that 2 m Rad ⁡ ( A ) {\displaystyle 2{\sqrt {m}}\operatorname {Rad} (A)} is precisely the average width of the set A {\displaystyle A} along all diagonal directions of a hypercube. == Examples == A singleton set has 0 width in any direction, so it has Rademacher complexity 0. The set A = { ( 1 , 1 ) , ( 1 , 2 ) } ⊆ R 2 {\displaystyle A=\{(1,1),(1,2)\}\subseteq \mathbb {R} ^{2}} has average width 1 / 2 {\displaystyle 1/{\sqrt {2}}} along the two diagonal directions of the square, so it has Rademacher complexity 1 / 4 {\displaystyle 1/4} . The unit cube [ 0 , 1 ] m {\displaystyle [0,1]^{m}} has constant width m {\displaystyle {\sqrt {m}}} along the diagonal directions, so it has Rademacher complexity 1 / 2 {\displaystyle 1/2} . Similarly, the unit cross-polytope { x ∈ R m : ‖ x ‖ 1 ≤ 1 } {\displaystyle \{x\in \mathbb {R} ^{m}:\|x\|_{1}\leq 1\}} has constant width 2 / m {\displaystyle 2/{\sqrt {m}}} along the diagonal directions, so it has Rademacher complexity 1 / m {\displaystyle 1/m} . == Using the Rademacher complexity == The Rademacher complexity can be used to derive data-dependent upper-bounds on the learnability of function classes. Intuitively, a function-class with smaller Rademacher complexity is easier to learn. === Bounding the representativeness === In machine learning, it is desired to have a training set that represents the true distribution of some sample data S {\displaystyle S} . This can be quantified using the notion of representativeness. Denote by P {\displaystyle P} the probability distribution from which the samples are drawn. Denote by H {\displaystyle H} the set of hypotheses (potential classifiers) and denote by F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} the corresponding set of error functions, i.e., for every hypothesis h ∈ H {\displaystyle h\in H} , there is a function f h ∈ F {\displaystyle f_{h}\in F} , that maps each training sample (features,label) to the error of the classifier h {\displaystyle h} (note in this case hypothesis and classifier are used interchangeably). For example, in the case that h {\displaystyle h} represents a binary classifier, the error function is a 0–1 loss function, i.e. the error function f h {\displaystyle f_{h}} returns 0 if h {\displaystyle h} correctly classifies a sample and 1 else. We omit the index and write f {\displaystyle f} instead of f h {\displaystyle f_{h}} when the underlying hypothesis is irrelevant. Define: L P ( f ) := E z ∼ P [ f ( z ) ] {\displaystyle L_{P}(f):=\mathbb {E} _{z\sim P}[f(z)]} – the expected error of some error function f ∈ F {\displaystyle f\in {\mathcal {F}}} on the real distribution P {\displaystyle P} ; L S ( f ) := 1 m ∑ i = 1 m f ( z i ) {\displaystyle L_{S}(f):={1 \over m}\sum _{i=1}^{m}f(z_{i})} – the estimated error of some error function f ∈ F {\displaystyle f\in {\mathcal {F}}} on the sample S {\displaystyle S} . The representativeness of the sample S {\displaystyle S} , with respect to P {\displaystyle P} and F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} , is defined as: Rep P ⁡ ( F , S ) := sup f ∈ F ( L P ( f ) − L S ( f ) ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rep} _{P}({\mathcal {F}},S):=\sup _{f\in F}(L_{P}(f)-L_{S}(f))} Smaller representativeness is better, since it provides a way to avoid overfitting: it means that the true error of a classifier is not much higher than its estimated error, and so selecting a classifier that has low estimated error will ensure that the true error is also low. Note however that the concept of representativeness is relative and hence can not be compared across distinct samples. The expected representativeness of a sample can be bounded above by the Rademacher complexity of the function class: If F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} is a set of functions with range within [ 0 , 1 ] {\displaystyle [0,1]} , then Rad P , m ⁡ ( F ) − ln ⁡ 2 2 m ≤ E S ∼ P m [ Rep P ⁡ ( F , S ) ] ≤ 2 Rad P , m ⁡ ( F ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} _{P,m}({\mathcal {F}})-{\sqrt {\frac {\ln 2}{2m}}}\leq \mathbb {E} _{S\sim P^{m}}[\operatorname {Rep} _{P}({\