Users have already found a workaround to bypass the UK Online Safety Act’s new age verification system.
According to PC Gamer, it only took 24 hours after the law went into effect for someone to get past the age requirement on Discord. All they needed was a little help from the video game Death Stranding. X user DanySterkov discovered that using a selfie of Death Stranding character Sam Porter Bridges (portrayed by actor Norman Reedus) successfully granted access to Discord’s adult-only channels.
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PC Gamer replicated it and was also able to “verify their age” with a Sam Porter Bridges selfie.
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The UK Online Safety Act, which went into effect last Friday, requires platforms hosting adult content like Reddit, Discord, and Pornhub to implement age verification methods. The law seeks to restrict users who are under 18 years old from accessing adult content. Critics of the law highlight the privacy risks of sharing personal information with the platforms, and say age-verification laws might not be that effective, since there are workarounds like using a VPN.
Discord offers two ways of age-verification for UK-based users: ID matching, or uploading an image of themselves which is scanned to determine how old they look. Clearly, choosing the latter option gives users a relatively easy way of circumventing the age-verification system. As one redditor joked about the workaround, “60% of the UK population is now Norman Reedus.”
