Pornhub to restrict access for UK users from next week
5 hours ago Share Save Liv McMahon Technology reporter Share Save
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Pornhub has announced it will restrict access to its website in the UK from next week, blaming the tougher age checks which have been introduced for explicit sites. From 2 February, only people who have previously made a Pornhub account will be able to access its content. Aylo, Pornhub's parent company, said that updates to the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA), requiring age verification, had "not achieved its goal of protecting minors" and had "diverted traffic to darker, unregulated corners of the internet". In October, Aylo said the law change had caused traffic to the website to fall by 77%.
Ofcom, the regulator, said at the time that tougher age checks were fulfilling their purpose of stopping children stumbling across inappropriate material. An Ofcom spokesperson said on Tuesday "porn services have a choice between using age checks to protect users as required under the Act, or to block access to their sites in the UK". The regulator said it would continue its dialogue with Aylo "to understand this change to its position". Alex Kekesi, head of community and brand at Aylo, said the move to restrict UK access to Pornhub had been a "difficult decision". "Our sites, which host legal and regulated porn, will no longer be available in the UK to new users, but thousands of irresponsible porn sites will still be easy to access," she said. Kekesi said the platform initially complied with OSA obligations "because we wanted to believe that a determined and prepared regulator in Ofcom could take poor legislation and manage to enforce compliance in a meaningful way". But six months after age check requirements were introduced to stop children accessing adult content, Kekesi said the company's experience "strongly suggests that the OSA has failed to achieve that objective". A spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said: "The Online Safety Act is clear: online pornographic services must stop children accessing this material by putting robust age assurance in place. "It does not stop adults viewing legal content, and services do not need to leave the UK - they simply need to ensure under 18s cannot access it. There are a range of ways to do this."
Pornhub remains the UK's largest porn platform, according to web tracker Similarweb. It was one of thousands of sites which implemented ways for UK visitors to prove they were over 18 as age verification requirements took effect last summer.
Getty Images People visiting Pornhub in the UK are met with a notice asking to verify their age
Those attempting to access Pornhub in the UK after 2 February will effectively be met with "a wall" instead of site content, said Kekesi. The same restrictions will apply to other porn sites owned by Aylo, including YouPorn and Redtube.
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