Any platform with "priority content", such as adult images and violence, now has a legal obligation to block content to under 18s. This means ID and age verification. The guise of this is to protect children; who would be against that? Well, it's not just pornographic sites that fall into this, it applies to social platforms like X, Facebook, and forums too.
If a site does not comply, they face fines of up to 18 million pounds or 10% of its global revenue, policed by Ofcom, the UK's media regulator. Ofcom can even order the entire site to be blocked in this dramatic change of law.
Many sites have just forcibly complied, initiating age verification or simply hiding the content from users. Few have taken a stand. One option many have taken is to block UK users from access to avoid any legal or financial risk, with some platforms having restricted access for UK users.
Wikipedia took a positive stand for privacy, refusing to install age checks and arguing it endangers their editors, violating the anonymity and privacy of its global contributors. They said this would undermine the privacy of editors, particularly on controversial topics. Rather than comply, they threatened legal action against Ofcom.
These age checks are not handled by the site; most use companies such as Yoti, KWS, and Persona to outsource this data farming of your IDs and selfies. This opens the door to an outsider hack stealing all this data. These companies say your data is deleted after a few days, but you as the user cannot pick this, nor select which provider to use. Gone is your privacy.
The premise of this law is fully dystopian. It hands not just the age check but extraordinary powers to Ofcom, a company that mostly managed broadcast standards and telecommunications in the UK. They can demand changes to how a site operates or remove or restrict access to content. They can even order ISPs to fully block domains entirely with full court approval.
The enforcement is not the main danger, it's actually in the government's discretion. The act gives Ofcom the authority to decide what actually is "harmful", how a "platform" must deal with it, and even how strictly they have to enforce age verification. The Secretary of State can direct Ofcom to revise its code of practice at any time, in the name of public policy or national security. This gives the UK effectively the power to tell foreign companies what they are legally obliged to follow. The UK now has a legal pathway to influence what platforms can say and censor, simply by declaring something "harmful or hateful".
This is how it always begins. The UK had an anti-terrorist program called "Prevent", initially started to address Islamic extremism, but it now sees people who have negative sentiment and opinions of immigration as promoting a terrorist ideology. It is indeed a slippery slope.
What starts off under the guise of "safety and protection" soon becomes the very noose that will hang you. You don't have to criminalise speech when you make people fearful of saying anything. If people feel their digital footprint is being watched across multiple platforms, many will just disengage.
This isn't just the UK, while its reach is global. Even other countries have already passed age verification in social media. States in the US, like Louisiana and Utah, have welcomed such loss to privacy, with many more states calling for this too.
This also obliterates the modern internet and open web. Large companies like X and Meta can afford to pay to outsource this huge data farming being requested, make age-gated systems, and even absorb the legal risks. Smaller message boards, self-created forums, and hobby sites not so much. They will either close, comply, block the UK users, or just become a husk of what they were to begin with.
This is the quiet centralisation of the internet. Do not give up your privacy, or only a few tech giants will remain as sanitised, compliant gatekeepers, following a conveyor belt of conformity.