Porn in the UK
This week the UK was blessed with another visit from a senior Pornhub executive. The company’s last sojourn didn’t work out so well for them. I’m not sure this one has been any better although, probably wisely, this time Pornhub sent someone new.
Ms Alex Kekesi was here essentially to complain about the Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA). It is hurting their business. I shed no tears on that account but, just to remind everyone, the aim of most children’s advocates, me included, was never to make porn inaccessible to everyone. We campaigned for it to be made inaccessible to children. That is only possible if porn companies implement age verification.
Over the years Pornhub repeatedly said they didn’t want kids on their sites but steadfastly refused to do anything effective about it. In the UK the OSA is the only thing that moved them in that direction. But they don’t like it.
My jaw dropped
To make sure my ears weren’t deceiving me, I replayed the BBC News clip from yesterday in which Ms Kekesi expressed “concern” that the Online Safety Act (OSA) might drive people, including children, towards unregulated sites where they could encounter… well, presumably worse things than on Pornhub. Now there’s a not ironic thought one doesn’t want to dwell on for too long.
This lack of self-reflection and self-awareness takes us beyond parody. The pot, having long forgotten its own colour, now hints menacingly about what might be found on the underside of someone else’s kettle.
Here it’s worth recalling not all that long ago Pornhub only began taking serious steps to remove child sexual abuse material from its platform after Visa and Mastercard threatened to pull their payment services. Pornhub could have chosen to act sooner. They didn’t.
The only kind word Ms Kekesi had for the OSA was that, unlike some other jurisdictions grappling with how to protect children from pornography, in her view the UK’s age verification laws at least offer less intrusive ways to complete the process. Perhaps she’d had a lapse in concentration, but I’ve made a note in case she never repeats it.
Brass neck
There is no end to Pornhub’s brass neck. Kekeski puported to express sympathy for Ofcom. Kekeski thinks Ofcom has been landed with an “insurmountable task” and is being forced to play “wackamole” with porn web sites.
Is there any class of mischief where the authorities have been able to draw a line under it and say
“There we are. Solved that. It has all gone away so what shall we do next?”
Do we stop chasing online fraudsters because there seems to be no end to them and their clever new ways? Fake pharma and other dodgy web sites?
A 77% drop
Something has definitely changed in the UK
Compared with the month before the OSA became law, Pornhub say their visitor numbers from the UK are down 77%. This chimes with an earlier story in The Guardian which mentioned two other large porn sites that also appear to have lost customers since the OSA came into effect. And then there are various reports (which I have found hard to locate directly on Ofcom’s site so maybe the numbers were in a press briefing yet to see the light of day) saying the following
“Overall visits to pornography sites in the UK have fallen by nearly one-third in the three months since 25 July.”
and
“More than three-quarters of daily traffic to the top 100 adult websites goes to those that have implemented age assurance.”
The challenge of the small
Kekeski made numerous references to smaller porn sites, which for her seem to be largely synonymous with the unregulated ones referred to earlier. Part of Pornhub’s complaint is the only beneficiaries of the legislation on porn are smaller porn sites which, they say, stay under Ofcom’s radar or hide in plain site because there are so many of them.
Since Pornhub is such a dominant presence in the world of online porn, everybody else is smaller but the company is trying to implant the idea the legislation is failing or will fail because it is only helping an unknowably vast number of sites grow at their expense. Hmm. Not sure I ever signed up to a campaign designed to help sustain large porn monopolies but anyway they are wrong.
The law is still relatively new yet Ofcom has already launched 21 investigations into 60 sites and Apps, with the promise of more to come.
Will Ofcom ever reach every porn site or App?
We live in hope but if you can’t do everything at once then you should at least have a mechanism for prioritising. Plainly Ofcom has.
Minnows matter but bigger fish must come first.
Ofcom has quite a few weapons in its armoury which have not yet been deployed.
But what has changed and by how much?
How and on what scale have UK internet users’ behaviour and habits changed? Several commentators seek to minimise the achievements of the OSA suggesting a large part of what has happened is down to an increase in the use of VPNs and that increase was triggered by the OSA.
I wonder how many eight year olds are downloading and using VPNs and are being exposed to porn as a result?
VPNs will be the subject of my next blog. I have more or less already written it but this post is hovering on being too long so I will stop.
I am trying to be more disciplined on the question of length. I will not always succeed.
Original post by John Carr
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