Several Reddit communities dedicated to sharing news and media from conflicts around the world now require users in the UK to submit a photo ID or selfie in order to prove they are old enough to view “mature” content. The new age verification system is a result of the recently enacted Online Safety Act in the UK, which aims to protect children from certain types of content and hold platforms like Reddit accountable if they don’t.
Some of the Reddit communities that now include this age verification check include:
- r/IsraelCrimes, which aims to “Spread awareness of what is happening in occupied Palestine.” The subreddit regularly features videos of Israeli bombs killing Palestinians, clashes between protesters, settlers, and the Israeli Defense Force in the West Bank, and images of dead Palestinians, but also links to articles from news publications and discussion of the subject without graphic images.
- r/UkraineWarFootage, which bills itself as “a politically neutral subreddit for posting combat footage of the Ukraine-Russian war.” The subreddit regularly features graphic war footage from the frontlines of the war, sometimes from soldiers wearing GoPro-type cameras, but also other footage that’s available in mainstream news sources. Two of the top posts at the time of writing were a video of bombs falling in Kyiv that was published by The Guardian and video of the notoriously heated meeting between Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February.
- r/CombatFootage, “A forum for combat footage, and photos, from historical to ongoing wars.” The top post on that subreddit at the time of writing is a video of a Russian fuel train targeted by a long range Ukrainian drone. Other top videos at the time of writing show consumer-grade drones dropping explosives on soldiers in Ukraine and Burma, and Israeli airstrikes in Syria.
“We’re not at all surprised the UK government is deploying this tactic now when the world is paying attention to the horrors unfolding, they’d rather silence the discussion than confront their own complicity,” the moderators of r/IsraelCrimnes told me. “By labeling brutally documented atrocities as ‘mature content’ and gate‑keeping access, they reveal themselves as hypocrites: preaching democracy and human rights abroad while trampling them at home.”
The Online Safety Act is fundamentally changing how people in the UK access the internet and adds a layer of verification that is incompatible with the concept of a free and open internet as we know it. It doesn’t guarantee children can’t view mature content. VPN usage in the UK is already skyrocketing and kids are easily bypassing the kind of age verification tech Reddit is using, but that friction makes some information inherently less accessible.
“Reddit was built on the principle that you shouldn’t need to share personal information to participate in meaningful discussions,” Reddit said in a post explaining how it’s going to verify users’ age in the UK when they want to view “mature” content in order to comply with the Online Safety Act. “Unlike platforms that are identity-based and cater to the famous (or those that want to become famous), Reddit has always favored upvoting great posts and comments by people who use whimsical usernames and not their real name. These conversations are often more candid and real than those that force you to share your real-world identity.”
Reddit explained that it will verify users' age by partnering with Persona, an identity verification company that raised $200 million in April in a series D round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Persona asks users to upload a selfie or photo ID in order to verify their age. Reddit says it does not have access to these images, and that Persona does not retain those photos for more than seven days.
Reddit told me in an email that it restricts certain mature content in the UK, and that it defines “mature content” for these purposes per the UK’s Online Safety Act, which includes violent ,graphic content, and porn.
As free speech advocates have argued, and as the new age verification on certain Reddit communities now show, the result of this policy in practice is also to limit access to important information across the board, regardless of the user’s age. Reddit declined to say whether it saw a drop in traffic to these communities, but the age verification system is likely to make some users turn away because they are worried about their privacy and don’t want to upload a selfie or picture of their ID, or because they just don’t want to jump through hoops. In the past few days we reported that Tea, a women’s dating safety app which required users to upload selfies in order to prove they were women, exposed all those images which are now being posted across the internet.
“If visibility of r/IsraelCrimes is being restricted under the Online Safety Act, it’s only because the state fears accountability,” the moderators said. “We stand by the need for unfettered access to information, and we’ll continue working to ensure these stories reach every corner of the internet.”
Even if they work exactly as intended, age verification laws are going to further skew the internet’s ability to reflect reality with a bias that diminishes how cruel, bloody, and inhumane that reality can be. I don’t think it’s good or necessary for children to have easy access to ISIS beheading videos, but I also don’t think it’s good that a piece of legislation that aims to protect children is making it much more difficult for internet users, even if they are younger than 18, to view the emaciated bodies of children in Gaza who are dying of starvation, and to discuss that fact with other people on Reddit.
Reddit users can get access to the basic facts of what is happening in Gaza or Ukraine on other news sites and Reddit communities that discuss the news, like r/worldnews. But the decision by lawmakers to make it harder to see the brutal reality behind the news isn’t neutral. The Pentagon for years banned the media from covering flag-draped coffins of war victims coming back from Iraq, which made it easier to forget how many Americans died there, not to speak of Iraqi civilians.
When should kids be allowed to see the world in its full horror and who is responsible for that are extremely complicated questions that I’m not sure anyone has a good answer for. I certainly don’t. But in the UK, that decision has already been made, and now it will take us time to see the consequences. The same restrictions are also increasingly present in the United States, with age verification laws are expanding state by state, the passing of the Take It Down act which forces platforms to actively monitor speech, and lawmakers advancing the even more aggressive Kids Online Safety Act.
