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
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 (we’re not talking about accessing 18+ rated movies or games here) then it’ll be widely used.