Reddit and Twitter users face age checks under UK porn law plans

This could leave Twitter and Reddit facing a choice of either verifying which British users are over 18 or finding a way to remove adult material from their services in the UK. Neither site currently has substantive age checks to access adult material.

Pornography has been increasingly pushed off mainstream social networks. Facebook and Instagram have strict bans on pornography, while Tumblr removed all adult material from its service in 2018.

According to industry sources, the big fear among major porn sites is what happens if they comply with the law but smaller sites remain online without age checks.

The idea of putting mandatory age checks on porn websites, in an attempt to make it more difficult for under-18s to access adult material, has been floating around UK government circles for almost a decade. It became Conservative policy in the run-up to the 2015 general election, but despite passing the relevant legislation the original proposals collapsed amid legislative oversights and issues around its implementation.