The UK has recently started Implement the Age Check Rules for the Online Safety ActThe Washington Post reported It has had a significant impact on network traffic.
British law now requires porn sites to verify users’ age through means such as facial scans and driver’s licenses; it also requires online platforms to block children from exposure to adult content (that’s why sites like Bluesky and Reddit start checking for the age of certain users).
To study the effectiveness of the law, the post said it looked at the top 90 porn sites based on data from UK visitors from similar networks and found that 14 sites still did not perform age checks. All 14 of them seem to have experienced a dramatic increase in traffic, with one of them increasing year-on-year.
At the same time, many websites ostensibly criticize the law, related to petitions, and even propose instructions to resolve the law, all comply with the law.
John Scott-Railton, a researcher at Toronto Citizen Lab, told The Post that it was a “textbook illustration of the law of unexpected consequences”, adding that the law “suppresses traffic to compliant platforms” when it drives users to a website without age verification.
