Earlier this year, the UK put into effect the Online Safety Act to protect children from online harms, including pornographic content. Now, Pornhub claims that its site’s traffic is down 77% compared to July when the OSA was brought in. According to data from Ofcom, visits to **** sites in general in the UK have fallen by almost a third in the three months since the law came into effect.
Ofcom claims that the new law is fulfilling its primary purpose of stopping children from being able to easily access ****, which may or may not be true. There are alternative platforms that probably aren’t blocked and tools to get around blocks and it would be quite difficult for Ofcom to see how many users are accessing via those methods. According to Google Trends, searches for ‘proxy’ were heightened in the UK between July and September.
Aside from proxy sites which people have seemingly turned to, VPNs have also been used to bypass the blocks. According to BBC News, one VPN provider saw a 1,800% surge in downloads after age checks began, but this makes UK traffic look like traffic from another country, making UK visitors harder to track.
Some other people are believed to be switching to websites that are not in compliance with Ofcom’s regulations and allow access without age checks. Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, claims that websites that ignore the rules are being rewarded with an exponential growth in traffic.
Aylo said it wants to see device level age verification to take some of the load off of its shoulders. It also said the current arrangement is unenforceable as there are around 240,000 adult websites and getting all of them to comply isn’t feasible. Ofcom has defended the enforcement saying that any increase in traffic to non-compliant sites can trigger an investigation.
A cybersecurity expert that spoke to BBC News, Chelsea Jarvie, said that a mixed approach of device level age verification is needed alongside website-level age verification to be truly useful as neither are a silver bullet alone.