Users of Reddit and Twitter in the UK may be required to present their passport (these are the best in the world for travel) or credit card as part of the government’s proposed age verification rules to regulate the access to pornography.
The two sites are among the few mainstream social networks that continue to host large amounts of explicit adult material, which is why both platforms have been singled out.
This This is the reason why the English Government wants to put security measures as high as on websites with explicit content that base their business on pornographic videos and images.
This could leave Twitter and Reddit with the choice of verifying which UK users are over 18 or finding a way to remove adult material from their UK services.
Currently, neither site has substantial age controls for accessing adult material.
Porn has been drifting further and further away from mainstream social media. Facebook and Instagram have strict bans on pornography, while Tumblr removed all adult material from its service in 2018.
The proposed law will require UK users to Web sites to submit a form of identification (such as a passport, driver’s license, or credit card) to an age verification provider, who will then tell the website that hosts pornography that the user is over 18 years of age.
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Websites and networks that fail to demonstrate reliable age checks could be fined 10% of their global revenue by media regulator Ofcom, or risk being blocked by British internet service providers, they explain.
The cost of age verification costs between 15 and 20 cents per person on websites. Which makes for the big ones it is very easy but for the small sites an unaffordable gesture.
Previous industry estimates place the probable number of British users who consume porn online between 20 and 25 million >, about a third of the UK population. For this reason, we are talking about spending up to 4 million euros to verify them all.