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.
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.
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 givernment-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.
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.
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.
That’s another reason to not post on reddit. Why bring contents to that platform?