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

The United Kingdom recently started enforcing the Online Safety Act’s age-check rules, and The Washington Post reports that it’s already having a significant effect on web traffic.

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).

To study the law’s effect, the Post says it examined the top 90 porn sites based on U.K. visitor data from Similarweb, finding 14 sites that still don’t perform an age check. All 14 of them appear to have experienced a dramatic increase in traffic, with one of them seeing traffic double year-over-year.

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.”