UK age check law seems to be hurting sites that comply, helping those that don’t

The UK recently started Applying the Age-Check Rules of Online Protection ActAnd Washington has reported the post It is already having a significant impact on web trafficThe

UK law now requires pornography websites to verify their users’s age such as face scans and driver’s license; It is also needed that online platforms prevent children from being exposed to adult content (that is why sites like Bluice and Reddit have begun testing some users’ age).

To study the impact of the law, the post says it has tested the top 90 porn sites based on UK visitor data that finds 14 sites that still do not perform age checks. Of them, 14 of them seem to have a dramatic increase, one of them has seen twice the traffic years.

Meanwhile, many websites must have obeyed the law when criticizing it, requesting connection to a petition or even provided instructions to visit it.

John Scott-Railton Post, a researcher at the University of Citizens Lab at Toronto, told that “a textbook image of involuntary consequences”, adding the law “to the loyal platforms when driven on sites without age verification.”