By Gavin Boyle
After the U.K. began to enforce more stringent age verification laws on adult websites, popular platform Pornhub saw its traffic from the country reduce by nearly half.
“The strongest protections in the Act have been designed for children,” the U.K. government explained. “Platforms will be required to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content and provide parents and children with clear and accessible ways to report problems online when they do arise.”
Though the Online Safety Act passed in October of 2023, the country implemented major steps to truly protect kids from inappropriate content in recent months. The most important is the introduction of an age-verification requirement on websites that give users with access to adult content. While this mainly applies to pornography websites like Pornhub, other sites that have had to introduce the system as well – or limit access to certain features behind age-verification – include X, Grindr and Reddit.
Related: Age-Verification Requirements Force Pornhub to Shutter Operations
With the introduction of age-verification in July 25, adult websites in the U.K. have seen their usage drop by nearly 50%, with the amount of traffic they see dropping by the millions. These sites continuously claim that age-verification is a net negative, arguing that users move to other sites that are less safe.
“As we’ve seen in many jurisdiction around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites,” a spokesperson for Pornhub told the BBC.
However, Pornhub and the other pornographic websites run by its parent company Aylo often feature extreme content that is outright illegal, alongside its “tamer” content. In 2020, leaked document from the company revealed that its systems flagged over 700,000 videos as rape or child assault, which it allowed to remain on the site. Instead, the company knows that age-verification makes it much harder to target kids and teens who are not legally allowed on the site.
It has lobbied against similar age-verification laws being passed in the U.S, even taking Texas to the Supreme Court over such legislation. Thankfully, the law was upheld, allowing the numerous age-verification laws passed in other states to remain in place as well.
“The First Amendment leaves undisturbed States’ traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene from their perspectives,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas when delivering the ruling. “That power includes the power to require proof of age before an individual can access such speech. It follows that no person — adult or child — has a First Amendment right to access such speech without first submitting proof of age.”
“With the rise of the smartphone and instant streaming, many adolescents can now access vast libraries of video content — both benign and obscene — at almost any time and place, with an ease that would have been unimaginable at the time of Reno and Ashcroft II (a former ruling that challenged the legality of age-verification laws),” Thomas continued.
Praise the Lord for the way the U.K. is protecting in children. Hopefully the U.S. will follow suit and not allow adult websites to continue to prey on and profit off of children whose innocence is stripped from them.
Read Next: Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn Site Age Verification Law
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