Is age-verification the way to curb porn access to children?

Is age-verification the way to stop children from accessing pornography?

There are reports that traffic from Britain to Pornhub, the world’s biggest adult site, has dropped by half since the UK implemented its age-verification law.

The law has sparked pushback from internet users, adult websites, privacy advocates in the UK, as well as US politicians and tech giants.

But what happened? And do we know about the law and its impact? And can age-verification really work?

Let’s take a closer look

A brief look at the law

First, let’s briefly examine the law. The legislation is officially known as the Online Safety Act (OSA). The idea behind the law was to protect children from seeing pornography and other harmful material such as suicide, self-harm, eating disorders online.

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The law ordered websites which hosted some pornographic content to implement age-verification checks to stop children accessing them by July 25. Websites were told to verify the age of the users via a number of mechanisms including credit card checks, photo IDs and even selfies.

The law mandates huge fines for websites failing to do so – $24 million (Rs 192 crore) or 10 per cent of their global revenue whichever is higher. It also warned that executives of the websites could be jailed if they did not comply with these terms.

Britain’s media regulator Ofcom is in charge of enforcing the law. Ofcom has warned that it could even take websites who do not adhere to these rules and regulations to court and stop them from being accessed in the UK. Ofcom has already opened probe over two dozen websites for potentially violating the Online Safety Act.

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What happened?

Visits to Pornhub from the UK have dropped nearly half after its age-verification law went into force on July 25. Pornhub, which is the UK’s most popular pornographic website, saw at least one million fewer visitors per day in the two weeks since the law was introduced, as per data from aggregation firm Similarweb.

In July, Pornhub witnessed 3.2 million visits per day from the United Kingdom. However after the introduction of the law, that number was cut down to 2 million visits per day.

This came after users were told to upload official government IDs, send their bank details, or scan their faces to prove they were of age.

Visits to other adult sites also similarly fell.

XVideos, another popular porn site, also lost nearly half its daily audience with traffic down 47 per cent, while XHamster witnessed a 39 per cent decline. OnlyFans, meanwhile, witnessed an over 10 per cent drop in traffic.

All top 90 adult sites have been impacted. Monthly visits from the UK decreased by nearly 25 per cent.

Can age-verification really work?

That’s the question.

Ofcom says its data shows that children aged eight to 17 spend between two and five hours daily. The data shows that almost all children over the age of 12 have mobile phones.  Nearly all of them visit platforms such as YouTube and TikTok to watch videos.

The development also comes as the UK saw a spike in the number of virtual private networks (VPNs) apps being downloaded. There are reports that VPN downloads have increased anywhere from 60 per cent to a massive 500 per cent. Google trends data in the UK showed that searches for “VPNs” had increased by 700 per cent.

Users across the world wide web frequently employ VPNs – which can disguise their real location – to access websites that have been barred by local governments. As per Ofcom, 14 million people in the UK watch pornography every day. Those who use VPN’s would also be technologically savvy, that is, younger people. This of course defeats the very purpose of an age-verification check in the UK.

Critics of law abound

Pornhub isn’t happy.

“As we’ve seen in many jurisdictions around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites”, Pornhub said in a terse statement to the BBC.

Aylo, which operates both Pornhub and YouPorn, has previously called age-verification “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous”.

Some argue these age-verification checks and restricting access to certain websites could send some people in the wrong direction – for example to the dark web.  A petition to repeal the law has already gathered over 450,000 signatures.

Privacy campaigners are also warning about a threat to individual freedoms. They say such age verification checks are needlessly invasive can lead to their identities being made public. Digital age checks can lead to “security breaches, privacy intrusion, errors, digital exclusion and censorship,” Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, warned BBC.

Reform UK is already calling for the law to be repealed. Nigel Farage, the chief of the far-right group, has called OSA “state suppression of genuine free speech,” and his party is running high in polls.

“Millions of people have noticed that what they’re getting on their feeds is different to what it was,” Farage recently said.

However, it must be noted that the law still has strong support in the UK.

A new YouGuv poll taken after the implementation of the OSA showed 69 per cent supported it. Meanwhile, nearly half, 46 per cent of respondents, said they supported it “strongly.”

However, 52 per cent said they did not think the law would stop minors from seeing porn online.

US politicos slam law, other countries follow suit

The UK law has plenty of critics abroad too. A number of US politicians have slammed the UK law.

“I just don’t want other countries to follow us down what I think was a very dark path under the Biden administration,” US Vice-President JD Vance, who recently took a trip to Britain, has said.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, added that online safety laws in Europe are having “a serious chilling effect on free expression and threaten the First Amendment rights of American citizens and companies.”

“We absolutely need to protect children and keep harmful, illegal content off these platforms — but when governments or bureaucracies suppress speech in the name of safety or regulation, it sets a dangerous precedent that threatens the core of Western democratic values,” Jordan added.

However, that hasn’t stopped other countries from following suit.

Australia and Ireland have already put into place similar age-verification laws. Denmark, Greece, Spain, France and Italy have begun testing a common age verification app.

The US isn’t exempt either. Louisiana in 2022 passed a law requiring websites which host some adult content to comply with age-verification measures. Some of the states are also mulling over doing so.

With inputs from agencies