The UK recently began implementing age check rules for the Online Safety Act, and the Washington Post reports that it has already had a major impact on web traffic.
Under UK law, a porn website is required to verify a user's age through means such as face scans and driver licensing. Online platforms also need to prevent children from being exposed to adult content (this is why sites like Bluesky and Reddit are beginning to check their users' age).
To study the effectiveness of the law, this post examined the top 90 porn sites based on Simarweb's UK visitor data and found 14 sites that still don't perform age checks. All 14 people seem to be experiencing a dramatic increase in traffic, one of them seeing double the traffic compared to the previous year.
Meanwhile, many websites have ostensibly criticised the law and provided instructions to link to petitions urging them to repeal or avoid it.
John Scott Railton, a researcher at the University of Toronto Citizen Lab, said this was “a textbook illustration for the Law of Unintended Consequences,” adding that the law “controls traffic to submissive platforms while driving users to the site without age verification.”