Presumably this is a response to the Online Safety Act.
However it doesn’t make much sense, because Imgur no longer hosts sexually-explicit content due to pressure from advertisers, and there has been no communication from them to suggest that they have had any trouble due to of the content that people warned may get caught up in the OSA (which, while a real risk, would be a lengthy court battle)
For me this is an inevitable result of the OSA but Imgur also likely bears some responsibility. If 4chan is still available in the UK, there was no need for Imgur to go dark, at least not at this stage.
They don’t aim to host it, but since anyone can upload anything they can’t guarantee it. So to be legally OK they have to do the whole age guard and region locking.
The puritans have managed to make strip away the first two w-s of www. Makes propaganda campaigns easier.
Anyone can upload anything to reddit, but they only prevent you from accessing 18+ communities unless you go through the ID process. To be legally OK they have to get rid of/age lock such content in good time.
It’s the same with all sites that allow user-submitted content.
So a subreddit where all posts get auto-deleted after one hour would not need age lock. Even if people use it for porn. Hmm