The UK government has decided to have another go at introducing age verification measures for pornography, despite failing to get the plan off the ground in 2019.
Announcing the plan on Safer Internet Day, digital minister Chris Philp said the measures would form part of the UK government's new Online Safety Bill with the aim of making the internet "safer" for children. "It is too easy for children to access pornography online," he said in a statement. "Parents deserve peace of mind that their children are protected online from seeing things no child should see."
"We are now strengthening the Online Safety Bill so it applies to all porn sites to ensure we achieve our aim of making the internet a safer place for children."
The law will bring a new legal duty requiring all sites that publish pornography to "put robust checks in place to ensure their users are 18 years old or over."
"This could include adults using secure age verification technology to verify that they possess a credit card and are over 18 or having a third-party service confirm their age against government data," reads the government's announcement. If sites don't comply, independent regulator Ofcom will be able fine them up to 10 percent of their annual worldwide turnover or can block them from being accessible in the UK. People in charge of these websites could also be held criminally liable if they don't cooperate with Ofcom.
This isn't the first time the government has announced plans to launch age verification for porn sites.
Back in 2017, the Digital Economy Bill outlined a proposed age verification system for porn websites, immediately sparking concerns about privacy and the impact on independent sex workers. This act, which was dubbed the "porn block", would have made the UK the first country in the world to bring in robust age verification laws for online pornography. The age checks would have required uploading a passport or driving licence or purchasing a "porn pass" from a shop to prove one's age. The law was intended to make online pornography less available to children.
After multiple postponements, the government said the new measures would come into force in April 2019, before being delayed until July 2019. By Oct. 2019, it was announced that the so-called "porn block" was being ditched completely.
Three years on, the government is revisiting the controversial plan.
In its announcement the government cites research carried out in 2020 by the British Board of Film Classification, which found that 51 percent of children aged 11-13 have seen pornography.
It's a gesture that feeds into the UK's long-standing hand-wringing and moral panic about online porn and young people. Dr. Carolina Are, online moderation researcher at City, University of London, tells me that the main response we hear with regard to online porn, or anything nudity-related that's publicly visible online is "oh, won't somebody think of the children." "My first response to that is, 'well, what about their parents? Won't their parents think about their own children?" says Are.
"We need to contextualise, explain, and educate about nudity, and the reason why a lot of kids go and watch porn is because sex education is almost non-existent and the best sources for it are now luckily on social media, but up until a while ago, porn was the main resource," says Are. She adds that the move feeds into the moral panic about porn and ignores individual responsibility. "Children are known to circumvent any sort of age-gating, any sort of verification, in some way or another," adds Are. "It's been done with green passes, fake IDs, I can't see this working with porn in any way."
Young people and porn
As I wrote in my book, Rough, there is a worrying flattening of discourse when it comes to conversations about porn, young people, and violence. Headlines blaming porn as the cause of sexual violence feed into broader efforts to restrict access to porn, but they also misconstrue academic research on the topic.
Porn’s relationship to sexual violence has been extensively researched for decades since the 1970s. If you look closely at much of the research on this topic, you’ll find that researchers have found associations between porn consumption and certain behaviours but, crucially, they have not proven that a causal link exists. Some studies, and subsequent media reporting on the findings, conflate an association with causality, which are two different things.
"An association does not mean something causes another," sex educator Justin Hancock explains. "People may have these attitudes in order to be drawn to watching porn, so there could be a change in attitudes as a result of watching porn, or it could be that there isn't. Or someone who is interested in porn may have some of these attitudes in the first place."
Commenting on the most recent news, Hancock tweeted, "The rationale for doing this rests on some pretty faulty 'common sense' assumptions. Porn is not something that most young people are engaging with. The effect of porn (or any media) is not simple, causative, or always harmful."
A slippery censorship slope
Aside from being a move based on flawed ideas, what are the implications of introducing age restrictions for porn? Are says that the Online Harms Bill presents a slippery slope due to the penalties that the measures will carry.
"We've seen what happened with FOSTA/SESTA in the U.S. — it's a law that was meant to fight sex trafficking, but because platforms have been afraid to get done for sex trafficking, they decided to overly censor sex work," says Are. She adds that there is a trickle-down effect to that censorship, which impacts, in her case, pole dancing (Are is a pole dance instructor), as well as impacting online sex educators, and lots of stuff that is not related to sex trafficking.
"If a bill like this is approved in the UK, platforms are going to over-censor even more."
"If a bill like this is approved in the UK, platforms are going to over-censor even more," Are adds. "The first targets are going to be sex workers whose presence is going to be viewed as risky, so therefore platforms will heavily ban sex workers even more to avoid getting heavy fines or the possibility of being removed from the UK." And it's not only sex workers under threat: it's every user sharing some sort of nudity or sexuality online.
"I just don't believe in these ad-hoc laws because they just become a game of whack-a-mole for platforms to target, it just impacts on individual users instead of on problems being solved," Are adds.
We know that young people are curious and they want to learn about sex. And sometimes they stumble on porn by complete accident. In the absence of robust, reliable sex education that talks about pleasure, young people's desire to learn about sex will not go away.
The answer is simple: improve sex education. Censorship isn't the answer.
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