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
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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.
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.
I just dropped reddit some time ago… Time consuming + annoying tracking from their side.
Be prepared for rapid growth on lemmy. It will lead to growing pains. This has happened several times before and regularly happens on mastodon etc
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Yeah ID shouldn’t be a requirement to write some bullshit online, like wtf doesn’t anyone realize it’s ridiculous
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How can you walk away from that many internet points?
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I made a post about those points once. The comments were fun to read though.
everybody needs to be on their best behavior for the next few weeks ok
why are people blaming reddit instead of EU ? (i dont like reddit either )
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).
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
tl;dr: screw reddit. Good bye forever (again).
I had to go back to reddit about a year ago to promote local mutual aid organizations and protest groups. I had turned my “since 2008” account into nothing but over the top abuse aimed at u/spez and vulture capitalism during the RiF debacle. I made a new account and engaged a little bit. I commented now and then, because you have to have minimal amounts of activity to post on some of the local subreddits.
Two days ago, I got flagged by automoderator for mocking a conservative on r/politics. I apparently had like 8 hours to tell the mods I was sorry, but I had no idea I’d been flagged, because I hardly go on reddit so I didn’t know. They gave me a three month ban and when I messaged them to be like “why was I banned?” because it didn’t make sense to me… I hadn’t done anything that objectionable, a mod very condescendingly told me “You had 8 hours to respond to the complaint, but didn’t avail yourself of the opportunity. You may protest the ban in 3 months.” I seriously messaged them back with “enjoy your enshittification train to corporate town.”
For mocking a conservative on r/politics? Back when I read it, half of r/politics mocked conservatives. Most of reddit still does. Are they going to ban everybody?
Are they going to ban everybody?
Hopefully.
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.
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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.
Reddit blocks me if it detects a vpn
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.
It’s amazing you think you’re immune to this 🤣 or think the admins are going to go to jail protecting identites.
The second any instance hits enough users to draw attention they’ll crumble faster than a quarter miles top fuel dragster.
Yes, but at least here I can choose an instance in a privacy friendly jurisdiction or one that is small enough, including a self-hosted one. It’s not a perfect shield, but federation helps a lot with digital independence (which is why it’s prominent in pre-internet theories of how to make anarchy work without collapsing into warlordism).
Literally no. Lemmy admins should shutdown the instance before implementing age restriction. And I’m not sure if lemmy will ever get that popular.
Oh I’m sure that’ll happen 👌👍
Also you can simply chose to not give away your identity and switch to a different instance. If you dont trust any instance you can just selfhost one. Lemmy is resistant to these kind of attacks due to its decentralised nature.
Yeah, I’m sure that’ll survive hundreds of rounds of multiple owners getting shut down 🙄
What are you even trying to say? Can you please remove your sarcasm and make an argument I can understand?
People could create overseas instances that dont have age restriction. Stop being so righteous and sarcastic and actually engage in a conversation.
Ineffective
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As far as I can tell, you seem to be right and this seems to be a EU thing: https://leminal.space/post/37117472 (Sorry for just redirecting to another post, but the topic is relatively complex and I did a write-up over there.)
God fuck this
No mail yet, but I’ll delete my account before i participate in that bs
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
I wonder how that’ll work with RSS and old Reddit. That’s all I use when reading Reddit
I read somewhere recently that old reddit will require you to be signed in. 🫤
Edit: found it.
The website includes a quote from a Reddit employee:
Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and Redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in.
I didn’t realize casually browsing a website is “abusive scraping”. Isn’t that the equivalent of claiming that reading a news article online is “abusive scraping”?
That quote doesn’t say that casually browsing is abusive scraping. I really hate that you’re making me defend Reddit here, but two things can be true at the same time: you use it for casual browsing, and it is a significant source of abusive scraping for them.
That is true, two things can be true at once. I sometimes fail to realize that.
😏
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.
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…
