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
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.
I already deleted my 15 year old account, all of my posts, and all of my comments. Fuck Reddit and their shitty policies.
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.
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.
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?
This is the only proper response if anyone still has a reddit account
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! 🤗
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…
How can you walk away from that many internet points?
Haha, never cares tbh, just a proof of time invested, nothing else for me.
Yeah ID shouldn’t be a requirement to write some bullshit online, like wtf doesn’t anyone realize it’s ridiculous
just saying this out loud is crazy … i need to identify myself to read and write!
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.
Fuck reddit, fuck spez. Could not care less. Left this cesspool when the api price thing happened, replaced my posts with gibberish and moved on to lemmy. When I want a recipe for a pizza with glue un the cheese I just let a fuckin ai crawl this pile of shit.
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
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
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.
Actually good. Now people don’t have to worry if some minor is pretending to be an adult on their NSFW subs.
On the other hand, adults getting ID’d for Palantir purposes sucks.
The porn is going to go away or be way lower quality. People are not going to post stolen pornographic content on account tied to their real identity.
Very brave of you to assume this will actually work.
If this was done at the ISP level then it would work, but they won’t.
That would be even more dystopian however. There doesn’t seem to be any good way to do age verification for big internet services without basically removing all anonymity online. Zero knowledge proof doesn’t seem to necessarily save you either, see Cory Doctorow talking about it: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/
On the other hand, adults getting ID’d for Palantir purposes sucks.
What do you mean? Handing over a detailed registry og millions of people’s political opinions, sexual preferences and medical histories to a fascist oligarch with a creepy Messiah complex is a small price to pay to make it harder for 16 year olds to look at titties.
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 🙄
No instances have to be shut down, if Lemmy world asks users to perform age verification, I’ll just move my account to sh.itjust.works and those who are ok with giving strangers their ID can stay on Lemmy.world. And so on and so forth until you find an instance that you trust that doesn’t live in a jurisdiction that bends the knee
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.
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.
God fuck this
