Ofcom: ‘Access to online porn must be ring-fenced against under-18s’

Flimsy age checks which do not prevent children from accessing online pornography must end, the UK’s media regulator has warned.

Industry guidance, published by Ofcom last week, outlines various mechanisms it believes pornographic websites could use to make it much harder for under-18s to access harmful online content.

In keeping with the Online Safety Act, the guidelines require sites that host pornography to “deploy” age-verification systems which could be considered to be “highly effective”.

Compliance

Age assurance checks deemed “capable of being highly effective” by Ofcom include the use of photo-identification and facial age estimation.

But the regulator said “it is for each provider to consider which age assurance methods and processes will be most appropriate for complying with the duties under the Act”.

Ofcom’s Chief Executive Dame Melanie Dawes explained: “Services which host their own pornography must start to introduce age checks immediately, while other user-to-user services – including social media – which allow pornography and certain other types of content harmful to children, will have to follow suit by July at the latest.”

Change

Launching the guidance last week, Dame Melanie said: “For too long, many online services which allow porn and other harmful material have ignored the fact that children are accessing their services.

“Either they don’t ask or, when they do, the checks are minimal and easy to avoid.

“That means companies have effectively been treating all users as if they’re adults, leaving children potentially exposed to porn and other types of harmful content. Today, this starts to change.”

Pornographers who fail to introduce “highly effective” age checks could be fined up to ten per cent of their annual global turnover.

‘Loophole’

Last year, Pornhub claimed that it is exempt from the Ofcom requirements for “providers of pornographic content published or displayed on the service”, which came into force this month.

Instead, it is trying to argue that it will be covered by similar rules for user-generated content, which are not to be enforced until July.

The Age Verification Providers Association told Ofcom that websites such as Pornhub should be clearly covered by January’s guidelines.

It said: “To the general public, such sites would often be the first they think of when they consider pornographic sites, and are not obviously user-to-user services.”