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
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/