Reddit has begun rolling out mandatory age verification for any NSFW content, as well as for some social media functions, if the AI determines you might be under a certain age.
Another good day to be on Lemmy… until the surveillance capitalist tech overlords lobby enough to get their great firewall of the West, anyway.
Further reading:
- https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/50368431806484-European-Union-Digital-Services-Act-DSA
- https://cybernews.com/security/eu-age-verification-app-hack/
- https://piunikaweb.com/2026/02/19/persona-age-verification-surveillance-allegations/
- https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/23595536875796-Digital-Services-Act-DSA-Information-for-EU-users
The thing that pisses me off is that, on paper I’m not against it. It’s the way they do it and collectively fuck over everyone else that irritates me. I’m not giving my ID out. Fuck off.
And PSA: Getting access to a VPN is ridiculously easy nowadays. I got around my Dads router restrictions when I was a teenager. VPNs are easier than that. You’re not doing anything to protect children. They’ll find a way.
Reddit blocks me if it detects a vpn
It often shadowbans for that, so you can still log in and read, but if you post, only YOU can see your post. Nobody else can see your post. It gives you the illusion that you posted.
One of the ways ppl knew if they were shadowbanned, was to open the post in a private window. But that will be harder now. The priate window won’t be logged in, so you won’t be able to look. And ofc if you log in, you’ll see it, b/c that’s what shadowban does. The only way will be to use an alt account to look.
The enshittification continues.
Spoiler alert, both British officials and EU officials are openly considering to slap an age restriction on VPN software, too. Would turn into a weird Catch-22, where you need a non-restricted VPN to download a non-restricted VPN, like in China right now.
fuck giving your GOVERNMENT ID to a private fucking company. Holy shit, is this 1984 or what?
Although I didn’t use it often, I would use facebook, mostly to look at my special interests. Not really to chat with people or whatever. Anyway, when my country brought in ID for social media, I just haven’t been back. I’m not giving my FUCKING GOVERNMENT ID TO A FUCKING PRIVATE SPYWARE COMPANY. Fucking hell.
Yeah. If it can’t be safely done directly by an official public system, there shouldn’t be age verification at all.
I would definitely feel much more comfortable if it was through the government directly but even then for some reason parents don’t want to accept they have to actually….parent, and monitor their children in this day and age. So they want the government/corpo to do it for them. It’s fucking pathetic.
Apple literally introduced a massive update to parental controls in iOS 27. It’s insanely easy and you have so much control. I plan on doing that with my own son. I’m not gonna give out my ID to these random ass websites because people wanna be lazy shitheads.
on paper I’m not against it
Perhaps you should be, since there doesn’t seem to be a non-dystopian way to do age checks on the internet at a large scale (as in, for more than e.g. sites dedicated for porn, and other very narrow examples). See Cory Doctorow write about Age Verification of any kind: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/ Or look at this EU wallet writeup: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/eudi-wallet/wallet-development-documentation-public/-/work_items/13
That’s not entirely true. It’s only impossible without governments working toward it.
We have plenty of tech options to develop a secure way to have a government-issued digital ID that is able to only share selected information, like your age. But that has to come from governments, not companies needing to verify your age.
The best part is that it can be private, as in: The government doesn’t need to know who requested your age, and the website doesn’t need to know anything else than your age and which government is confirming it.
And the tech required isn’t even necessarily new or recent.
I disagree. A widely useed digital id in itself is dystopian due to the one-click deplatforming risk, and if you require age checks everywhere for regular discussion forums like Reddit then it’ll be widely used.
I just dropped reddit some time ago… Time consuming + annoying tracking from their side.
A day may come when I upload my ID, and verify my identity online, but it is not this day.
If you’re in the EU, it might come sooner than you think: https://leminal.space/post/37117472
I’m in the US. Honestly, if things keep going like this here, in Canada, and in the EU, I might have to move to Norway or Switzerland or something.
Regarding Switzerland: https://www.privately.eu/post/swiss-safetytech-setting-the-standard-in-privacy-first-age-estimation-technology-greatly-reducing-the-need-for-id-checks
I think the only way we’re getting out of this is if people start protesting to their representatives way louder and in way greater numbers.
For anybody reading in the EU, consider emailing one of your representatives and demand they undo this age verification surveillance stuff: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates (Site is unrelated, it just happens to have a list of representatives.)
For anybody in the US, find your representatives here: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
Will they even listen to us?
Hmm. They will. They’ll listen through all of our internet-enabled devices with microphones.
I feel very hopeless about this.
If you haven’t contacted a representative yet, I suggest you do it. After that, it’s time to continue with the hopelessness 😵💫 relatable for sure…
Wow can’t wait for the influx of 12-17 year olds on Lemmy.
Some really valuable perspective… They can tell us when it’s curtains for Zoosha
Fuc reddit… I just got banned for favoring Ukraine over Russia. Seriously. Some Russian dude posted a video saying that Russians should take pictures of all their air defense to show Ukraine it’s still there and very strong. I said, “Ukraine would love for you to do that.”. BANNED. So yeah, fuck reddit.
Same for me 2 years ago now, when Russia hit the big shopping centre, I suggested it was maybe time for Ukraine to start hitting the Kremlin, permabanned.
Yeah. See now it’s to the point that i didn’t even say anything about hitting them, or attacking at all. So it has progressed to the point that purely favoring Ukraine constitutes a ban if they find out. But I figured I’d get banned for one thing or another eventually though lol. Was just a matter of time.
So “13 year olds, immutable secure setting because you are a child and we cant get as much wealth from you anyway.” But “16-17 year olds, you’re still a child, but if you wanna do some more stuff we’re not gonna stop you.”
I already deleted my 15 year old account, all of my posts, and all of my comments. Fuck Reddit and their shitty policies.
This is the only proper response if anyone still has a reddit account
FYI, you didn’t actually really delete any comments, they still have them and will often even restore them when accounts do mass deletions.
Those comments are theirs now.
Yeah it’s impossible to really remove much of anything from the internet. They’re welcome to restore them. It took no effort on my part. I used a browser extension. When it was done, I deleted my account. Most of the comments were just answering Linux questions or commenting on music and guitar posts.
I don’t even click search results from Reddit. When they started turning over info on users who had negative things to say about ICE, they lost me for good.
Where was that reported?
Over-write first, then deletes. Optionally, allows you to do download your comments first for archival.
Thanks. Too late for me but might help someone else.
No mail yet, but I’ll delete my account before i participate in that bs
Just received the e-mail myself… now I am here! Hopefully more users with migrate soon.
Welcome!
Welcome, friend! 🤗
I’m in the US, but still, maybe getting booted off of there was the universe trying to tell me something.
https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-don-t-force-age-checks-online Consider acting now if you don’t want it to come to other US platforms, too…
They’re used to people screaming fuck no and doing it anyway.
They sure will if everyone rolls over without even trying to protest. Consider contacting your representative: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm Or for the EU: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates
It’ll be like Facebook. The inertia and the sense of everyone doing it will keep Reddit alive. Even though it’s estimated that 50-60% is bot activity.
Indeed and to “celebrate” this I deleted the 5 accounts I had (was project related) still.
I already deleted my main years ago but those ones were just unused for 10 years. Good time to signal (if anybody cares checking through usage data) that I’m not supporting this.
why are people blaming reddit instead of EU ? (i dont like reddit either )
Oh, I absolutely am blaming the politicians behind this (and the lobby groups behind them). The only strictly wrong thing Reddit does is how it implements that law, i.e., using third-party age verification that happens to also use your data to profile you and that has been shown to be insecure (Further Reading links in my post).
There are many who think there’s no sufficiently secure, risk-free way to do that verification.
See this write-up about the EU wallet: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/eudi-wallet/wallet-development-documentation-public/-/work_items/13
Or Cory Doctorow on Age Verification of any kind: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/
oh yeah i agree , the eu governments can implement a service where they do the age verification themselves but i think they do this on purpose because they work for US and the whole thing is for surveilling and spying on people
The whole Stop Killing Games debacle clearly showed us that the EU, despite its rhetoric, isn’t interested in championing consumer rights in the slightest.
I live in the EU, this his honestly the first I’ve seen age verification on any platform.
LinkedIn (Microsoft) has also been slowly introducing identity verification, and they’re also using Persona.
Persona has also been used for several years now by American companies hiring EU citizens, to verify their job history and background.
I’m betting that Persona “forgetting” your information is bullshit, and whenever you use them they add more of your info to your profile. They’d have your job history, your LinkedIn activity, your Reddit activity etc.
As far as I can tell, it’s not Reddit’s fault: https://leminal.space/post/37117472 But I could be wrong. Read the details for yourself, and if you don’t like it then consider contacting your representative to complain (this isn’t ChatControl related but they have a useful contact list).
Something I never see anyone talk about, is how, with all the ‘fingerprinting’ and data collection/analysis these companies do, they already know whether you’re 18 or not. I know this isn’t actually about “protecting the children”, but I’d still like to hear more discussion from the angle of: they already surveil us enough for this purpose.
Me -> NAL. So I’m only guessing.
One prob might be that fingerprinting IDs a device. There could be a 70 yo and a 7 yo using the same dev in the same house. It prob wouldn’t stand up in court when Little Billy, 7, became a victim because Grandpa Wilson, 70, used the same device. Or the old dev fingerprint gets used with a new account. They let the account in b/c they know the fingerprint. But they never knew the dev was sold to a new owner who is 15.
Fingerprinting is way more powerful than most ppl realize. But it does have limits. If the EU, or the US, comes at them, they need something straighforward and easy to explain to a jury. If Little Billy forged a photo ID, that’s a solid defense for the co. But if they screw up with hard to explain statistical methods, they have more legal risk.
I understand this argument, but I don’t think it’s anymore “foolproof”. How often are you going to have to present ID? Every hour?
God fuck this
