Age verification laws are killing web traffic
With the UK having recently brought the Online Safety Act into force, age verification laws are having a huge effect on traffic to web sites. Predictably, sites which comply with age verification requirements have noticed a marked drop-off in visitor numbers, while the opposite is true for non-compliant sites.
In the UK, it is – currently – only pornographic sites that are supposed to implement age verification (although other sites are supposed to take action to prevent minors from accessing adult material as well). Working via a combination of facial scans and documentation checks, the impact of the law has been felt very quickly.
An investigation by the Washington Post looks specifically at the situation in the UK, but acknowledges that there are also age verification checks in place across much of the US. With a focus on porn sites, the investigation found an unsurprising difference in the effects on sites that complied with the age check laws and those that did not.
Drew Harwell writes:
The sites that complied – by mandating that users show their government IDs or scan their faces through their webcams, so an algorithm could estimate whether they were adults – saw visits from British internet addresses collapse. But some of the biggest porn sites that disregarded the “scan your face” rule entirely have been rewarded with a flood of traffic, a Washington Post analysis found. Some have doubled or even tripled their audiences in August compared with the same time last year.
There are many downsides to this method of policing the internet, including the risks to privacy involved and the scope for mistakes to be made. More worrying is the risks that the sites that have chosen to comply with the rules are negatively impacted, and users who find they are unable to access sites as they used to are driven to some of the darker regions of the internet.
So, it seems that in a vote-winning attempt to stop young people from accessing pornography, the UK government may actually be turning the hunt for porn into a game. Unable to access certain sites, minors are being pushed to underground sites serving up content far more extreme than the compliant sites.
The effect of age verification checks
Porn sites are reliant on ad revenue, so any drop in visitor numbers is impactful. The Washington Post reports:
To evaluate the early effectiveness of the law’s rollout, The Post gathered UK visitor estimates over the past year for 90 of the largest porn sites as ranked by the market intelligence firm Similarweb. The Post then used a software tool known as a virtual private network, or VPN, to appear online as a UK user and check whether the sites verified a visitor’s age.
The analysis found that 14 sites didn’t do an age check, and that all 14 had seen major boosts in their traffic from UK users. One explicit site saw its U.K. visitor count double since last August, to more than 350,000 visits this month.
Even the sites attempting to comply with the law showed some odd or awkward results. Several sites showed explicit ads and thumbnail images, or allowed visitors to watch the first few minutes of its videos before prompting for their age.
Speaking to the Washington Post, John Scott-Railton, a researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto studying surveillance and digital rights, called the UK case “a textbook illustration of the law of unintended consequences”. He berates the law saying that it “suppresses traffic to compliant platforms while driving users to sites without age verification”, adding that: “The more the government squeezes, the more they reward the very sites that scoff at their rules”.
Image credit: Bùi Hoàng Long