Age Verification / Age Assurance

Age verification, sometimes called age assurance, is the practice of requiring users to prove they are old enough, typically eighteen or over, before they can view certain content, increasingly mandated by online-safety laws. In July 2025 Reddit began requiring users in the United Kingdom to verify their age before accessing gated material, in order to comply with the UK's Online Safety Act, which is enforced by the regulator Ofcom and carries fines of up to eighteen million pounds or ten percent of global revenue.

Reddit outsourced the checks to a third-party vendor, Persona, which accepts a photo of a government identity document or a live selfie; Reddit has said it receives only a user's verification status and date of birth and not the underlying images. In practice the gating extended well beyond pornography to content touching on suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and hate speech, and it swept in many non-explicit communities such as forums on periods, quitting smoking and sexual assault. The rollout drew criticism from digital-rights groups for over-blocking lawful speech, for the privacy risk of handing identity data to a for-profit vendor, and for being easy to bypass, for example with video-game face filters. Age verification matters as a concrete example of how content-moderation law reshapes platform design, distinct from Reddit's older NSFW tagging.