Online age checks must be in force from today

[IwantToRetire]

• Tech firms must introduce age checks to prevent children from accessing porn, self-harm, suicide and eating disorder content
• Bluesky, Discord, Grindr, Reddit and X among latest firms to commit to age-gating, while Ofcom lines up targets for enforcement
• Sites and apps where children spend most time must make their feeds safer

Sites and apps which allow harmful content must protect children from accessing it from the end of this week, Ofcom has warned, as the deadline approaches for tech firms to comply with new rules.

The changes mean that risky sites and apps – large and small – must use highly effective ‘age gating’ methods to identify which users are children, and then prevent them from accessing pornography, as well as self-harm, suicide and eating disorder content.

Continues at https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/online-age-checks-must-be-in-force-from-tomorrow

I must admit I haven't been following this closely, but thought some on FWR might have concerns or wonder what it is, and in fact will it in anyway help protect children, and particularly girls, from sexualised content, and being stalked. And no doubt each week, some new male generated app or whatever created to lure trusting young people into serious and harmful situations.

My view is that it will have some impact, perhaps where such offensive content is viewed more than the amount of times it is. Every little is worthwhile though.

Ofcom are second only to Ofwat as a useless regulator, so I am not confident it will be strictly enforced.

I have really read up on this so aren't sure if they are going to be pro-active or just rely on people reporting offensive content.

There was a headline only this week that Musk was objecting to having to apply this to X.

They're all losing their wee minds on Reddit haha! (Though r/uk_beer needs verification? Seems like overreach)

A lot of the criticism is like "but children are super tech savvy and will just use a VPN!" Have you met today's young people? They've been brought up using iPhones, they haven't a clue. They have the tech skills of 80 year olds. This law is overall a very good thing.

Completely unnecessary that the alcohol pages on Reddit require age-verification.

Also I don't like this deliberate overreach of the legislation, it isn't just pornography it is "harmful and dangerous content". People particularly those here shouldn't need reminding that many consider biological reality "harmful, dangerous and hateful" content.

Everything with legislation from the government (this and the last one) has deliberately woolly language allowing for interpretation, and for it to be abused.

Pornography is fairly easy to define, but dangerous and harmful isn't.

@Augarden I think its a good thing. I'm not prudish or anti-sex but I do think there is at this point clear evidence that the porn industry does great harm to both the performers and many of the viewers and that applies to both sexes. Porn isn't harmless it's a supernormal stimuli that has been packaged as a commodity and exploits the neurobiology of many of the people who use it to the point of addiction, especially young people. It isn't perfect but it does create at least more of a barrier to access with hopefully more to come.

Unfortunately it appears that not all commonly visited porn sites in the UK are complying as yet both XNXX & Video are still accessible with no requirement for verification and so in breech of the law. Reporting these sites to Ofcom might help them to take swifter action.

What part of 'Smartphones are not suitable for children' do people not get?

For years and years the clear advice has been that children under 16-ish don't need them, and don't have the capacity to use them safely and responsibly.
If children need a way to contact somebody in an emergency, a cheap, non-smart 'Nokia' phone is all they need.

The simplest way to make it difficult for children to access inappropriate content is not to give them 24/7 unsupervised access to the internet via their own smartphone.

It's not the responsibility of the tech companies to make sure that children as young as 8 or 9 are not accessing violent porn or sending nude photos of themselves or bullying classmates online.

Car manufacturers are not responsible for making sure that children are not taking their parents' cars and driving around in them; that danger is prevented by parents not giving the car keys to their children.

This is going to be one of the things that future social historians will look back on, and seeing the damage that has been done to children by devices placed in their hands by adults, will ask 'What on earth were they thinking? They knew that they were putting children at risk, they were warned time and time again that phones are not suitable for children, but they just went ahead and did it anyway. Go figure'.

People often say, 'get real, there's nothing you can do, that ship has sailed, they all have them, it's just the way things are..' but it looks like the tide might be turning, as more and more schools are banning phones during class time, and even adults find themselves benefitting from 'tech detoxes' away from their phones.

@MarieDeGournay It has nothing to do with phones. Porn websites are typically accessed through a computer, not a phone. Years ago, we didn't have phones, but most teens viewed porn on a regular basis using a computer.

This law seems like a bit toothless, and it seems more like an action for the government to say "look at us, we are doing something" rather than a law which will actually drive change.

First, teens will get around this easily using a myriad of methods.

Second, not all websites have the restriction enabled.

Third, I would question many of the arguments being presented. There's an argument that teens shouldn't see hardcore and violent material, but the teen will only seek that out if they want to view that material to begin with; the interest is not caused by viewing the material. I would also question whether it's a good thing for teens to never see any sexual material; I wouldn't have known what female genitalia looked like until my late 20s if there weren't images and videos online.

It has nothing to do with phones?

Nearly a quarter of UK five-to-seven-year-olds now have their own smartphone, Ofcom research suggests.
Ofcom: Almost a quarter of kids aged 5-7 have smartphones

• 99% of children spend time online.
• nine in 10 children own a mobile phone by the time they reach the age of 11.
• three-quarters of social media users aged between eight and 17 have their own account or profile on at least one of the large platforms.
• despite most platforms having a minimum age of 13, six in 10 children aged 8 to 12 who use them are signed up with their own profile.
• almost three-quarters of teenagers between age 13 and 17 have encountered one or more potential harms online.
• three in five secondary school-aged children have been contacted online in a way that potentially made them feel uncomfortable

The impact of smartphones and social media on children - House of Commons Library

Throughout my career as school-leader I have witnessed the harmful impact of pornography on young people. I will never forget the girl who told me about her first kiss with her boyfriend, aged 12, who strangled her. He had seen it in pornography and thought it normal.
Let me be absolutely clear: online pornography is not equivalent to a ‘top-shelf’ magazine. The adult content which parents may have accessed in their youth could be considered ‘quaint’ in comparison to today’s world of online pornography. Depictions of degradation, sexual coercion, aggression and exploitation are commonplace, and disproportionately targeted against teenage girls.
Dame Rachel De Souza, children's commissioner for England
‘A lot of it is actually just abuse’- Young people and pornography | Children's Commissioner for England

@MarieDeGournay There's nothing in your post that suggests children or teens are using their phone to access porn. Any child or teen can very easily do so using the computer at home.

Excellent posts @MarieDeGournay as always Thank you. I don’t understand why the poster above 👆 insists on disagreeing with you.

I think these measures are long overdue and a (bare minimum) step in the right direction, and so I welcome them.

I'm not sure how effective it will be but I think it's a good thing porn has played a big part in how men and boys view women and girls and over the last couple of years it seems to have got a lot worse.

Sites like pornhub have been under investigation for porn where victims had been trafficked and allegedly some of those victims were underage.

It won't completely solve the issue as grown men can still watch this type of porn but hopefully it will stop boys turning out like them.

It's not, and anyone is able to get a VPN running. At the simplest it's just installing a browser with a free VPN built in like Brave or Opera, TOR does the job too for porn. Tech savvy users can also set up their own VPN.

Even users on here know about VPN/TOR, there's a long thread on here about trying to access kiwfarms forum when it was an onion only site.

Also this- "VPN demand soared in the UK starting from Friday, July 25, 2025
Proton VPN recorded a +1400% hourly increase in signups over the baseline, starting from midnight"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/vpn-demand-skyrockets-in-the-uk-as-age-verification-checks-are-enforced/ar-AA1Jj6co

What's more, a lot of people seem to think Pornhub is the only porn site on the internet. It's actually one of hundreds of thousands of porn sites most of whom aren't going to comply with age verification. Without a VPN all British internet users have to do is go to a search engine, and potentially end up on a lesser known porn site with more extreme content. Despite what people say about PH it's actually one of the safest porn sites on the internet, verification is required to upload videos (most sites don't have this), all videos by non-verified users got removed and it has strict rules on what can be uploaded and searched for (attempting to search for certain content will simply take the user to a page reminding them of the rules).

It's what happens when something is made illegal, it goes underground (no Ash Regan, that doesn't mean locked in an underground cellar). People simply find a way to keep doing it and end up in more risk.

Er, I had no idea this was coming in today. Or really what it entailed.

Just been over to reddit and so many subs which have nothing to do with porn or harm even have been 18+. It’s anything NSFW with a very low bar.

Things such as pimple popping, endometriosis support, stop drinking, drug safety.

I have had this in the past where I have had to unblock our standard safety restriction on net or phone because it’s restricting stupid stuff; could be a news article or blog from a random part of net, research on something which happens to be lottery funded (so flagged as gambling), and once I had it blocking botany pages because I have no idea. Perhaps that talks of sex. Plant sex. Who knows?!

Yes this is real bad.

It sounds very subjective. Is it all websites or only ones that are aimed at young people? Although surely Grindr is in no way aimed at young people.

If endometriosis and pimple popping are flagged then Mumsnet would be caught too.

Young people will easily be able to circumvent it. While the government is letting some Random company have and keep our identity data that it can and will sell to 3rd parties….

What porn, self-harm, suicide and eating disorder content is found on MN? Or harmful or dangerous content…?

Could keep ofcom busy though I’m guessing they’ve developed an algorithm to evaluate web content.

I’m content about it. Anyone prepared to make an actual effort to get round it can. So serious political campaigning etc won’t be impacted.

It will slow down the ease with which DC and the vulnerable get to inappropriate content, and that’s a good thing. It protects people from their own impulsivity.

It’s the equivalent of the top shelf, back in the day. Perfectly accessible. Just a bit harder to reach, particularly by the small.

There are a few memes going around

Problem is the Internet is disproportionately made up of pornography addicts who naturally aren't taking this too well. So there's a lot of pushback and that's affecting how even sensible people see things, because they aren't getting the same exposure to the arguments in favour.

Though I remain deeply suspicious of anyone coming on here arguing against the measures as I think there is probably a bit of a propaganda drive from the chronic masturbators, some of whom seem suspiciously blasé about protecting children from sexual harm.

Really this is an obvious safeguarding measure which ought to have been in place 20 years ago. The fact that it can be circumvented fairly easily is beside the point. Lots of laws designed to protect people are easy to break, that doesn't mean we shouldn't have them.

The fact that the likes of Reddit may be overrestricting things is not a problem with the legislation. (Though personally I haven't had any problems with the stuff I look at on Reddit.) Reddit profits massively from pornography and it's very much in their interest to make the legislation look unworkable by implementing it badly on purpose.

In my experience VPNs have a tendency to fall apart with data-heavy content (which would include pornography), because routing everything through an additional server makes everything much slower.

"VPNs have a tendency to fall apart with data-heavy content (which would include pornography), because routing everything through an additional server makes everything much slower"

This is 2025 not 2001 dial-up. Most standard connections in Britain today won't have any issue at all with streaming a video through a VPN or even through TOR (which 20 years ago was slow even for loading text). Today's internet is like Sonic the Hedgehog, gotta go fast.

Apparently there's a generic ID that security conscious people can use.
I've heard of people having to show it to log in to Twitter. I haven't had to add I assume I've been on the app long it's decided I'm probably old enough anyway.

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1m9uuli/online_safety_act_bans_under_18s_accessing_trans/

Terrible to hear that underage trans identified children can no longer access this life affirming nonsense....

Parents should use internet filters that their broadband supplier offers for free, and those filters are likely to be much better than hoping that porn sites actually follow the legislation.

People make it seem like it wasn't possible to filter out pornographic content until yesterday.

And as I predicted TRAs are already trying to classify MN as harmful content to get the age-restrictions on this site. If they succeed I assume anyone against having to verify their age on MN is a chronic masturbator?

I feel like MNHQ would manage age verification requirements better than Reddit HQ, if it came to that. Which I don't think it would - MN is not aimed at children and doesn't really have 18+ content. Maybe we'd lose the "sex" topic? I've never been there so I'm not sure how pornographic it is!