Reddit's Chaotic UK Online Safety Act Age-Verification Rollout

To comply with the UK's Online Safety Act 2023, Reddit introduced mandatory age verification for UK users in July 2025. Chief legal officer Ben Lee announced on r/RedditSafety that starting July 14 Reddit would begin collecting and verifying users' ages before showing certain mature content, ahead of the rules coming into force on 25 July. Verification ran through an outside firm, Persona, via an uploaded selfie or a photo of a government ID such as a passport. Reddit said it would not have access to the uploaded photo and would retain only a user's verification status and date of birth, and that Persona promised not to keep the picture longer than seven days.

The rollout drew immediate criticism for sweeping up communities far beyond pornography. The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented that subreddits dedicated to LGBTQ+ identity and support were placed behind the age wall, and that communities like r/periods, r/stopsmoking, and r/sexualassault were walled off to unverified users, alongside more absurd examples such as r/poker, r/vexillology, and r/worldwar2. Users reported bugs like being locked out or asked repeatedly for ID despite complying, and UK-based moderators reported difficulties viewing NSFW post submissions or vetting users' post history even when the material was entirely safe for work.

Privacy advocates warned that requiring identity documents to access a social platform creates a persistent link between a person's real identity and their online activity, concentrating sensitive data in third-party systems vulnerable to breach. EFF civil liberties director David Greene called the Act a "real tragedy," saying UK users could no longer use the internet "without having to provide their papers, as it were." UK users responded by downloading VPNs in large numbers, and a UK Parliament petition calling for repeal of the Online Safety Act surpassed the 100,000-signature threshold for parliamentary consideration. The government told petitioners it was working with Ofcom to ensure services faced "robust but proportionate regulation"; the petition closed on 22 October 2025 with 550,136 signatures, and Parliament debated it on 15 December 2025.

On 24 February 2026 the Information Commissioner's Office fined Reddit £14.47m for unlawfully using children's personal information, over failures between 5 May 2018 and 8 July 2025 in which it processed under-13s' data without a lawful basis. The regulator said Reddit had relied on asking users to declare their age when opening an account, a technique it said was "easy to bypass." "It's concerning that a company the size of Reddit failed in its legal duty to protect the personal information of UK children," said Information Commissioner John Edwards.

Reddit called the ICO's insistence that it collect more private information on every UK user "counterintuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our users' online privacy and safety" and said it intended to appeal. Social media analyst Matt Navarra called the combined actions the UK's "two regulator pincer movement coming into force," a turning point in how Reddit was seen and scrutinised by regulators.