UK Anti-Porn Age-Restriction Law Now Pushed Back To Spring 2019

The United Kingdom’s new law requiring all visitors to online porn sites to verify that they are at least 18 years old before viewing adult material was passed, as AVN.com reported, by that country’s parliament in 2017. The law was initially set to take effect in April of this year, but a series of delays have left the law dormant ever since. But this week, U.K. Minister of State for Digital and the Creative Industries Margot James told a parliament committee that implementation of the law has been set back yet again—this time at least until spring of 2019, according to a report by Britain’s Telegraph newspaper.  “We can expect it to be in force by Easter of next year,” James said in testimony this week. “I am hopeful of getting a slot to debate it before the end of the year. We have always said that we will permit the industry three months of getting up to speed with the practicalities and delivering the age verification that they will be required by law to deliver.” Even though parliament has already passed the age-restriction law, a second law must also be passed, putting into place the mechanism for checking the ages of porn site users—and that mechanism is in the hands of the sites themselves, which have yet to come up with a way to collect age information while also guaranteeing user privacy. One software package, which is expected to become the industry standard, has been developed by MindGeek, the parent company of PornHub and several other large porn “tube” sites.  But James also said that placing age restrictions on porn sites is only the beginning. The next step, she said, will be requiring similar age verification for social media platforms, such as Twitter and Tumblr, which allow posting of adult images and videos. Under James' plan, social media users under the age of 18 will be required to use a “digital passport” to access popular social media sites, to keep them away from the porn on those sites, James told Parliament, according to The Telegraph.  The social media “digital passport” system would be aimed a closing a loophole, as AVN.com reported,  which would still allow large amounts of porn to get around the age restrictions for adult sites themselves.   “It is a weakness in the legislative solution,” James said. “It is well known that certain social media platforms that many people use regularly do have pornography freely available on their platform.” “One of the concerns we all have is that children can stumble across pornography,” one member of Parliament, Carol Monaghan, said at the hearing this week. “We know that social media platforms where children are often active ... a third of their content can be pornographic.” But where Monaghan sourced the “one-third” statistic is not clear. A 2016 study by Italian academic researchers showed that on Tumblr, less than one percent of users post porn, and about 22 percent of Tumblr users have consumed porn on the site. Photo By Nikowsk/Wikimedia Commons