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
Just received the e-mail myself… now I am here! Hopefully more users with migrate soon.
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.
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
Can confirm. Just prepared an account and selected my communities. Have spent too much time on reddit with half a mil karma if that matters, just proof of the time spend there, but I am not giving my ID to social media…
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?
Reddit wants me to reset my password or my account is locked.
So. I’m locked.
But I don’t use it any more so not really bothered.
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.
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.
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
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?
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?
Come to Lemmy. We have kitties and cookies and stuff.
Here I am, not enough hands for all the cookies and kitties. Haven’t used Reddit in months and perfectly happy without it. Still sharing my sadness about seeing “the old internet” slip further and further down that slope.
Funny. I always regarded Reddit and the other centralized platforms as the new internet, and lemmy rather as the old internet. I’m from the BBS days, and although that was not federated, to me the fediverse looks more like it than any commercial platform.
I’ve been predicting for while we’re going to see two parallel Internets develop, the “new” net running on the old infrastructure that’s basically run by the big guys and a new infrastructure modeled after the old internet that’s decentralized. We’ve been seeing a bunch of different pieces from Fediverse to LoRa communication, Meshtastic, Matrix, increased hobbyist interest in old ways of connecting computers (even saw a guide on how to set up your own dial up ISP for fun), etc. I’m not sure exactly how all those pieces are going to come together, but a locked down internet is only going to increase demand for what was lost in its creation. And its already been trending this way for awhile.
Agreed. Lemmy, while being very new, mimics features of ye olden times. Newsgroup era and all… But Reddit kinda started that way and then, as all good things, slowly enshittified. It seemed to resist enshittification longer than most sites. At least that was my impression. But good things can’t last. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, after all, I guess.
It was probably always the case, that the enshittification was unavoidable already, from the very start, because of the essence of a company: incessant, ever-increasing greed.
We have kitties and cookies and stuff.
Yah. We do. For now. Mostly b/c it’s flying under the radar.
Long run, I think Lemmy cannot escape enshittification. Bots, politicians, lots of drivers.
Not having outrage amplifying algos helps Lemmy. But that’s like 1 driver of enshittitification. There are many other sources that will try to shit on the cookies.
I believe Lemmy is more resistant than reddit or w/e. But it won’t be enough. Esp if it becomes very popular.
Lemmy development being principally led by explicit communists should help a lot too. I do imagine that instances more aligned with the western spy states will have issues eventually, but hopefully their users will migrate to less censored places over time.
Now if the full western firewall gets created that’s gonna be rough for users. I don’t envy VPNs who are actually privacy-focused trying to breach that.
Lemmy will likely be affected too: https://hachyderm.io/@ell1e/116844253291555343 At least for the large enough instances or something, I’m not 100% sure about how it works but I read about some micro service exception that may or may not apply to some.
Or, instances can just choose to ignore it. Just host your instance outside the EU. Congrats. You win. Like yeah feddit.org and other imperial core™ instances will likely just shut down but most of lemmy will be absolutely fine.
Worst case scenario host it outside the EU and VPN to a neutral country and you’ll be fine.
bingo.
there have always been countries willing to host content outside the prying eyes of the West. There shouldn’t really be any expectation of that changing.
Hell, if things get really desperate, we can all pitch in for a boat and host via satellite out of international waters. I think PirateBay did something similar for years.
It might be a short-lived safe haven, regarding the US: https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-don-t-force-age-checks-online
Good thing that there are other countries outside the EU than just the US.
There are.
But if you get the US, EU and China all requiring ID verification… plus other authoritarian leaning countries like the Saudis and w/e. The odds that like, IDK… Bahamas or Iceland gonna hold the line on this are… long.
Prob not even Canada has the throw weight to do it in the long run. Love you frozen northerners, I got your back in every way I can in this effed up world, but Canada just doesn’t punch in the weight class of the EU, US, and China. Editing: I forgot Canada has Bill C-34, a similar bill to what US and EU are floating.
It’s so, so important for ID reqs not to pass at the national level in the US. There are strange bedfellows tho. It has bipartisan support AND bipartisan opposition. It could also face major 1A challenges here. Time will tell.
I don’t disagree that for most people, this will result in significantly less anonymity on the web and overall is a very dangerous trend.
However, that doesn’t mean that there won’t still be some countries that do not have such laws and that don’t answer to US/EU regulatory attempts. That’s already how many quasi-illegal (or even straight up illegal) websites that operate in such countries (such as circumventing DMCA requests), and these laws are highly unlikely to entirely prevent those from continuing to find safe haven countries.
Yah I do agree there will keep being those quasi gray area legal sites.
But even so, most ppl will live with the ID reqs, since they won’t go to the gray sites. Esp if the heavy hitters like US/EU go down the China road of hardcore clamping down on VPNs. In China today, some ppl get around that. It’s just very risky, so most ppl give up and use what the gov wants them to. I’m afraid we could eventually see a similar story in the US and EU. Also I forgot that Canada has a bill pending too, Bill C-34, the “Safe Social Media Act”.
IDK how the US bill will go. I am trying to remain hopeful. It sounds like it passed the House, but could be DOA in the Senate. And even if it passes the Senate, it’ll be hit with 1A lawsuits and go before SCOTUS. We can’t count our chickens yet or let off the pressure, but it has hurdles to clear before it becomes law of the land.
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
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.
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 🙄
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.)
I just dropped reddit some time ago… Time consuming + annoying tracking from their side.
everybody needs to be on their best behavior for the next few weeks ok
God fuck this
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
