Reddit and Twitter users face age checks under UK porn law plans
Reddit and Twitter users in the UK could be required to submit details of their passport or credit card as part of the government’s proposed age verification rules for pornography.
The two sites are among the few mainstream social networks that continue to host large quantities of explicit adult material. Ministers said that social networks “where a considerable quantity of pornographic material is accessible” will have to conform to the same age verification rules as other commercial pornography websites.
This could leave Twitter and Reddit facing a choice of either verifying which British users are over 18 or finding a way to remove adult material from their services in the UK. Neither site currently has substantive age checks to access adult material.
Pornography has been increasingly pushed off mainstream social networks. Facebook and Instagram have strict bans on pornography, while Tumblr removed all adult material from its service in 2018.
The proposed law will see individual British internet users required to hand over a form of identification – such as a passport, driving licence or credit card – to an age verification provider, which would then tell a website hosting porn that the user is over 18. Outlets that fail to prove they have robust age checks could be fined 10% of their global revenue by the media regulator Ofcom, or risk being blocked altogether by British internet service providers.
According to industry sources, the big fear among major porn sites is what happens if they comply with the law but smaller sites remain online without age checks.
Iain Corby of the industry group the Age Verification Providers Association said that if the policy was poorly enforced by Ofcom it could punish pornography websites that comply with the law. “You stop going to PornHub, then you go to XHamster, then you go to the next down the list. Whatever you think of those sites they do tend to have some standards. You are driving people to sketchier sites,” he said.
The cost of age verification is about 15-20p a person for websites. The pseudonymous sex blogger Girl on the Net said that the proposals could impact smaller websites: “The government proposes this every few years or so and it’s always unworkable, affecting smaller producers while benefiting bigger players in the market.”
Past industry estimates put the likely number of British online porn users at 20-25 million – around a third of the UK population.
The idea of putting mandatory age checks on porn websites, in an attempt to make it more difficult for under-18s to access adult material, has been floating around UK government circles for almost a decade. It became Conservative policy in the run-up to the 2015 general election, but despite passing the relevant legislation the original proposals collapsed amid legislative oversights and issues around its implementation.
Alastair Graham, the boss of age verification company AgeChecked, said that building trust with users about how their data is handled would be key to ensuring widespread take-up. “Our approach is to not know who our customers are. We want to do verification and confirm someone is old enough to get on to a site but we don’t create a database of people’s names and details on our platform,” he said.
“Even more importantly, the adult sites have no access to that personal information. The goal is to recognise an individual without knowing who they are.”
He argued the current system where it is easy for children to view pornography is no longer acceptable: “Currently we’re doing nothing. Doing something to protect children, if not all children, has to be better than where we are now. The internet was designed by adults for adults.”