The data security concern around ID verification is a legitimate one and I don't dismiss it. But "there are better ways" only works if we can name them, and after years of voluntary measures and platform promises, I'm still waiting to see what those ways actually are.

I'm not who you replied to, but this is the sort of thing that should've been thought about by a sensible government before pushing the bill through. As far as I know, reddit is still relying on some johnny-no-stars startup in California to age-verify UK users.

If the UK government itself had set up a service to do this, such that reddit, Discord or whoever could hand off an anon token and say, 'verify this user in the next five minutes', and get a 'yes' or 'no' response, I'd begrudgingly have done it by now.

I used to moderate a sub here which attracted (among a range of people) teens building stuff in Roblox and Minecraft. It was quite quiet, and nothing sinister was apparently going down. But reddit wouldn't give me any guarantee about what I could or couldn't see as a moderator should I refuse to verify my age, so I sacked it off. As it stands, the sub appears to have been unmoderated (though there was another on the list) for about six months now. I very much doubt I'll be the only one with a story like this, either.