A new law proposed in the U.K. aimed at making it tougher for minors to access pornographic material on high-trafficked social media platforms could have wider, unintended consequences and potentially make matters worse, argue industry insiders. If passed the regulation would require Reddit and Twitter users to submit age verification proof such as a passport or credit card to a third-party government contractor in order to view explicit adult content on the sites.
In doing so, critics worry that the safeguard wouldn’t deter children from porn, but instead merely force them to seek it out on seedier, predatory websites. “You stop going to PornHub, then you go to XHamster, then you go to the next down the list. Whatever you think of those sites they do tend to have some standards. You are driving people to sketchier sites,” Iain Corby, a member of Age Verification Providers Association, cautioned to The Guardian earlier this week.
