Age Verification Censorship Continues to Spiral Out of Control on Reddit

Reddits age verification has gotten so out of control, they’re blocking discussions about flags and journalism among others.

When the age verification debate first cropped up, the discussion was about how porn sites were supposed to prevent minors from viewing hardcore pornography. Even in those early days, I was warning that government was moving towards a tipping point. Specifically, government was moving towards censoring legally protected speech which is fundamentally different from government targeting legal grey areas and obviously illegal content. Once the government starts censoring legally protected speech (such as pornography which is what the government considered the path of least resistance), all bets were off and nothing would stop government from censoring, well, anything.

Much like so much of my other writing, those warnings wound up being quite prophetic. The percentage of porn requirements were dropped so that governments could include any website. From there, governments started tacking on other things like content deemed “harmful” (as is the case with the UKs Online Safety Act), not just “pornography” (which is, in practice, already a vague term regularly used to censor LGBTQ+ content). Even worse is that there is movement to ban youth from accessing social media completely (as is the case in Australia). My warnings have been proven valid many times over. This as I just sit here documenting just how far out of control mass government internet censorship is getting.

A microcosm of this out of control government censorship is apparently Reddit. As you know, back in July, Reddit threw its UK users under the bus and implemented age verification to appease the censorial UK government. Things have been going downhill ever since. Later on, it became apparent that things started getting censored that have nothing to do with “harmful” content. This includes political speech getting the black marker treatment for unverified users.

Well, it seems that the censorship has continued to spiral further out of control on Reddit for UK users. From the EFF:

On July 25, users in the UK were shocked and rightfully revolted to discover that their favorite Reddit communities were now locked behind age verification walls. Under the new policies, UK Redditors were asked to submit a photo of their government ID and/or a live selfie to Persona, the for-profit vendor that Reddit contracts with to provide age verification services.

For many, this was the first time they realized what the OSA would actually mean in practice—and the outrage was immediate. As soon as the policy took effect, reports emerged from users that subreddits dedicated to LGBTQ+ identity and support, global journalism and conflict reporting, and even public health-related forums like r/periods, r/stopsmoking, and r/sexualassault were walled off to unverified users. A few more absurd examples of the communities that were blocked off, according to users, include: r/poker, r/vexillology (the study of flags), r/worldwar2, r/earwax, r/popping (the home of grossly satisfying pimple-popping content), and r/rickroll (yup). This is, again, exactly what digital rights advocates warned about.

The OSA defines “harmful” in multiple ways that go far beyond pornography, so the obstacles the UK users are experiencing are exactly what the law intended. Like other online age restrictions, the OSA obstructs way more than kids’ access to clearly adult sites. When fines are at stake, platforms will always default to overcensoring. So every user in the country is now faced with a choice: submit their most sensitive data for privacy-invasive analysis, or stay off of Reddit entirely. Which would you choose?

If you are wondering why UK residents are working so hard to defeat the government censors, this is why. This is why UK residents are using VPNs, video game characters, and fake IDs. This all in an effort to protect their personal information and access the open internet so they can get the material they want. This isn’t even getting into the leaks and the multiple hacks that allowed that personal information to fall into the hands of malicious third parties.

At any rate, this heavy handed censorship is only going to continue to spiral out of control where anything can get censored. As long as governments continue their efforts to crack down on free speech on the internet, we’re only going to see more and more of this insanity unfold.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.