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
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.
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).
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.
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