Reddit Rolls Out New Age Verification System In The UK

Reddit started to roll out a new age verification system in the United Kingdom. The new technology will prevent users under 18 from viewing mature content.

Reddit’s Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee, known on the platform as “traceroo”, shared a post on Monday explaining the new measure.

“The UK Online Safety Act has new requirements to implement additional measures to prevent children from accessing age-inappropriate content,” wrote Lee. “So, starting July 14 in the UK, we will begin collecting and verifying your age before you can view certain mature content.”

The measure has been taken after the Information Commissioner’s Office announced in March that it was launching an investigation on multiple social media platforms, including Reddit, into how they safeguard children’s information.

Lee explained that, in an effort to comply with UK regulations while upholding Reddit’s core values—particularly its commitment to user anonymity—, the company has developed a system that verifies age without requiring users to disclose excessive personal information. This system is powered by the identity verification platform Persona.

“To verify your age, we partner with a trusted third-party provider (Persona) who performs the verification on either an uploaded selfie or a photo of your government ID,” added Lee. “Reddit will not have access to the uploaded photo, and Reddit will only store your verification status along with the birthdate you provided so you won’t have to re-enter it each time you try to access restricted content.”

Persona will retain the user’s ID image for no more than seven days and will not have access to the user’s activity or information on Reddit.

Lee also clarified that users’ ages or birthdays will not be visible to other users or advertisers. He also announced that they plan to introduce additional verification systems in the future to determine whether users are real humans rather than AI bots, though he did not provide specific details.

Reddit first warned about a new measure to make sure that users’ are human in May, after researchers reportedly deployed AI bots on the platform.