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UK age check law seems to be hurting sites that comply, helping those that don’t
The U.K. recently started enforcing new age-check rules, and The Washington Post reports that it’s already having a significant effect on traffic to porn sites.
U.K. law now requires pornography websites to verify their users’ ages through means such as face scans and driver’s licenses; it also requires that online platforms prevent children from being exposed to adult content (which is why sites like Bluesky and Reddit have begun checking some users’ ages). Meanwhile, many websites ostensibly complied with the law while criticizing it, linking to a petition urging repeal, or even offered instructions for getting around it. John Scott-Railton, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, told the Post that this is “a textbook illustration of the law of unintended consequences,” adding that the law “suppresses traffic to compliant platforms while driving users to sites without age verification.”
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