Reddit Age Verification Systems Now Censoring Political Speech

Reddit is proving that age verification really has nothing to do with pornography and more about controlling online speech.

One of the things I have long argued about age verification is that the efforts have little to nothing to do with “pornography” and everything to do with efforts to erode freedom of expression online. We were able to make such a conclusion when the age verification debate shifted from only targeting “adult” websites with a certain percentage of “pornography” (quotes due to the fluid nature of what defines the term) to any large website or service in case there is such content on those services. That includes the moves to implement age verification on things like video games, app stores, social media, and search engines. This after supporters of age verification admitted that such laws are not an end goal, but a stepping stone for even more ambitious censorship goals.

So far, many other sources seem oblivious to this fact, but as the rampant censorship efforts started being enforced on places like Reddit, Bluesky, Roblox, XBox, itch.io, and Steam, users have started complaining more and more about this out of control censorship.

Now, more evidence is surfacing that age verification is really is more about efforts to control speech and has little to do with “pornography”. Reddit has begun applying their age verification systems to subreddits that have little to nothing to do with things tagged as “NSFW”. Specifically, they are applying it to subreddits that are largely political in nature. From 404Media:

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.”

Indeed, the mass starvation being inflicted on the Gaza strip by Israel is well documented. The ongoing war on Ukraine by Russia who wants to fully wipe out that country is also well documented. If anything, children would benefit from learning about why war is so bad. Yet, the UK government is pressuring online services into blotting out any mention of the bad things that are happening around the world.

What this shows is that online censorship, as mandated by the UK government, is going well beyond censoring imagery that shows a little skin. It is showing that the censors are going after what they likely consider to be violent content as well. It doesn’t take much to understand the implications of this.

Indeed, violence is considered more socially acceptable (at least in “western” societies). As one person put it in regards to movies (couldn’t find the source of the quote), ‘you can’t kiss a boob, but you can shoot it’. As a result, there’s plenty of violence in movies, television, and, of course, video games. Obviously, traditional media gets away with a lot in that regard, but when it comes to online sources, that’s a different matter. A vast majority of online sources don’t have the protection and backing of billionaires to fight whatever legal case. As a result, you’ll probably see a worsening of a double-standard when it comes to what is and is not permissible to show between online and traditional media sources.

Where things get even worse is when you are dealing with anything even remotely political. If one country is engaging in atrocities and war crimes in another, then the best thing is for the world at large to know about said atrocities and war crimes. Sweeping crime by the powers that be under the rug only further enables those crimes to take place and allows corruption to spread. It gives politicians a veto power over what story can be said and what can’t. Hiding this behind the fig leaf of “for the children” doesn’t change any of that.

Either way, the problem of government mandated censorship is getting worse and worse. While this decision was technically made by Reddit, it was a decision made at the behest of government. If age verification laws weren’t part of the Online Safety Act, we wouldn’t even be talking about this in the first place.

I know some people get annoyed about talk about a slippery slope when discussing this, but the reality is that we are not only starting to go down a slippery slope, but we are speeding up as we slide further down this slope. After all, we are already going well past the fake talking point of stopping minors from accessing hardcore pornography and delving deeper into not only the places that are getting censored, but also the types of speech getting censored – and the types of speech getting censored is becoming an increasingly long list.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.