cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/43948771
Reddit hires company to verify user age with selfie or photo of government ID.
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.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?
It’s simple:
- Tag everything nsfw to comply with uk rule
- don’t tag anything nsfw because Reddit needs ads
- breaking rule 1 or 2 results in a ban
“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?
They need enough time to share it with other organisations before deleting it.
But bots have no age, haven’t they?
They’re technically almost all underage.
Is everyone in the UK a bot?
I am robot.
hello mr. robot
I am wondering how feddit.uk will handle this.
Good luck @flamingos@feddit.uk
I very much doubt Ofcom knows what Feddit is, let alone Lemmy.
Even if the probability is low, it’s understandable that admins want to avoid that risk
It’ll only be an issue if they host mature content or federate with other instances that do, no?
The OSA bill in the UK has caused a hamster forum to shut down over concerns of not being able to follow it (or the risks associated with non-compliance). It’s an unbelievably wordy and excessive bill that is a bureaucratic nightmare for small communities.
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.
To be fair, the idea that Ofcom even know Lemmy exists is unlikely.
They’ll get round to Lemmy eventually.
As soon as they breathe and give up on /r/NSFW they will slowly show up on the porch.
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)
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.
That’s my secret: I don’t log into reddit anymore or engage with any of the posts there
They do. Not all of them likely, but the most popular ones for sure.
eventually, the highly used ones will get you shadowbanned, but once you turn it off, your account might be immediately shadowbanned.
