Gotta put a lot of trust in some third party company not to reveal all the kinky stuff you watch that's tied to your identity.
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Governments all around europe are so scared of people communicating.
lemmynsfw.com is a thing.
You basically have to go there to view the NSFW content, don't you? I looked around some server federation rules and it seems like most servers block that one's local communities. (It doesn't appear to be out of ill will for the server, as most of them still allow federation of non-NSFW communities... But I imagine it's a large chunk of data to federate with very little reward since most Lemmy servers are run on little more than donations, volunteer efforts, and fumes.)
A few years ago YT suddenly started to enforce their system of not allowing me to watch videos tagged as 18+, my account was 17 years or so old, but I had never verified it, then it ticked over to 18 years old a few months later, and everything works now...
I can't watch a lot of youtube videos because of that, as that made them require an account.
This legislation will make sure everything gets locked behind an identifying login, lest a bad word might appear, and they get fined.
Good for the platforms and government ofcourse. It's only us people that lose.
Move along now. The joined corporate government newspeak will save you from evil. Feel like something's wrong? Here are your ssri's, osempic, and an AI best friend to keep you company 😚
Bruh, I've been 18+ since I was 14! 😁
Also, this is just another way to collect personal data that you'd never willingly give up through normal interaction with their platform.
But bots have no age, haven’t they?
"Persona promises not to retain the photo for longer than 7 days and will not have access to your Reddit data such as the subreddits you visit,"
Why would they need to have it any longer than the few seconds it takes to verify the age?
Look at what Reddit is saying. It's absurd:
For UK users under 18, Reddit said it has to restrict sexually explicit content; content that promotes suicide, deliberate self-injury, and eating disorders; content that incites abuse or hatred against people based upon protected characteristics; bullying content; content that promotes violence or "depicts real or realistic serious violence against a person, an animal, or a fictional creature"; content that promotes challenges or stunts that are likely to cause serious injuries; content that encourages people to use harmful substances or substances in harmful quantities; content that shames people based on body type or physical features; and "content that promotes or romanticizes depression, hopelessness and despair."
WTF? How is this supposed to work? A system that auto-blocks all NSFW tagged content itself as a blunt instrument is viable - but half the stuff on here, on Reddit here isn't even necessarily tagged as NSFW when its posted. Are extreme mountain biking or skiing or skateboarding or other similar types videos going to be age-gated because they could be content that "promotes challenges or stunts that are likely to cause serious injuries"? How do you verify whether or not content specifically romanticises "hopelessness" or "despair" exactly? Are Giles Corey songs now 18+? What does that even mean? Even the writing of it is Orwellian.
It also adds "depicts real or realistic serious violence against a person, an animal, or a fictional creature" ?????
Are action movie clips now going to be age-gated? Or video game clips? From TV shows and films that are PG-13?
They’ll get round to Lemmy eventually.
That’s the beauty of federation. Host your own instance. You can prove your age by looking in a mirror.
And any instances hosted in the UK or accessible from the UK are subject to this law.
Yes but all that means is you have to have content restrictions for under 18 users of your instance. Set your instance as private and only logged in users see anything. Done
Verification is part of the law
So verify your own ID by looking at it or as I said earlier just look in the mirror and
The legislation specifically states:
The verification process may be of any kind (and in particular, it need not require documentation to be provided)
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpa/2023/50/part/4/chapter/1
The laws are only as powerful as their enforcement. Censoring instances would be like playing a game of whack-a-mole.
I doubt it. This is Ofcom you're talking about. "What's a Lemmy"? (Said in the voice of Sandor Clegane)
As soon as they breathe and give up on /r/NSFW they will slowly show up on the porch.
Good luck @flamingos@feddit.uk
I very much doubt Ofcom knows what Feddit is, let alone Lemmy.
It'll only be an issue if they host mature content or federate with other instances that do, no?
Why would they have to handle it? This is Rddit's choice, not the law. I mean, why would Redit decide it now? Does Feddit fall under the same act? Or is it something new?
Feddit is actually (presumably) hosted in the UK, so if Ofcom actually knew what the Fediverse is they could start trying to demand they do age verification.
We're hosted in Germany, but that doesn't actually matter as the admins are physically in the UK so Ofcom fines are actually a worry. I need to do another review (yay), but I'm pretty sure we don't have to do any age verification. We do have to assume all our users are children though, as we can only say we don't if we do 'highly effective age verification'* of our users, and we do host content that is 'likely to appeal to children', but I don't believe we host anything that would need to be gatekept from children. We actively block NSFW content and as far as I'm aware there isn't a suicide encouragement or terrorist recruitment community on Lemmy. There are maybe some things that I may need to be changed/patch in Lemmy (e.g. letting users lock their own posts), or making some safety tools (one I want to work on is doing perceptual hashing of images embedded in markdown as current tools only work on post links), but I don't think complying is necessary an issue for us. I'm not a lawyer though and that's just my understanding, we could be fucked.
* This entire 'force every website to keep a separate database of users adult status' is so stupid and I swear it only works like this because of lobbying from companies like Yoti. PornHub is right that it should be device based, but these laws are only using children as a crutch. It's implemented like this because certain parts of the British establishment find porn icky and are hoping by making it more invasive to access that you'll stop watching it. Of course, all this is going to do is push people to sites that don't follow the law so host more extreme content.
Nah lol. Old reddit UI and a VPN should work fine, for now at least.
A redlib instance is also an option. Example: https://redlib.pussthecat.org/
I was told once that if you use a VPN Reddit Will Shadow ban you.
There's already a big flaw in this, and it won't work with teenagers.
If they want to access Reddit, they'll just do something like grab a pic of their grandparent who never uses Reddit, sneak out their ID whilst they're sleeping, and get verification without anyone getting notified.
Sounds extreme but I can just imagine teens doing this without issue. It would be extremely easy.
If a website requires me to verify my age, I'll stop using that website. If an app requires it, I'll either stop using that app, or use a VPN, but there's no way in hell I'm doing the verification process.
I think this might be a massive gift to people who want the internet to remain free and unrestricted.
The more people you drive into the underground, the less well you'll be able to regulate. Usually, it's a cautionary tale about carelessly over-strict regulation. But, I guess it can also be an uplifting tale about carelessly over-strict regulation, depending on what you're trying to regulate. Lord knows, we need to be teaching people how to dodge around local internet restrictions and monitoring right now.
Unfortunately most people don't think like you and I. Reddit wants the masses to feed AI, and they'll get them. They don't care about the "fringe" elements. They want consensus. Hence, all the bans.
FFS, if we think reddit is bad, what about the billions still on FaceBook? I literally flinch if I land there on accident. FUCK! GAH! It's repulsive to me, yet here we are.
If you make it to sterile it gets boring, if all the interesting stuff is elsewhere and all you have is meme slop you have no competitive advantage
Reddit has been meme slop since the IPO (and earlier) but it's still chugging along with fools buying outfits for their little reddit alien thing
There are numerous tools already out there for parents to use to monitor and censor what their kids see online. Schools have been using it since the Internet came out and it's only gotten more robust over the years. Not only that, but kids always figure out a way around this shit and will continue to do so until the end of time because that's just what they do. The only thing this does is punish everyone and implement more surveillance. And since people are people and kids are kids, there will be workarounds within days even without a VPN.
I'd prove I'm over 18 by purchasing a VPN subscription.
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