Users accessing online pornography in the UK could soon be required to have their face scanned, under measures announced by Ofcom to stop children seeing the material.
Enforcement guidelines released on Thursday, which will apply to social media platforms as well as sites such as OnlyFans and Pornhub, stipulate that children will no longer be able to simply assert they are 18 to view pornography online.
The communications watchdog also said adults would have to start proving their age – with methods including facial age estimation, credit card checks or matching with a photo-ID.
The requirements around the “highly effective” age checks will start coming into force this spring for several thousand services that display or publish their own pornographic content. The rules will bite on so-called peer-to-peer and social media services by July, with potential sanctions for breaches including fines of up to 10% of a company’s turnover.
The average age that children in England first encounter pornography is 13, with one in 10 viewing it as young as nine years old, according to research from the children’s commissioner for England, who has said depictions of “degradation, sexual coercion, aggression and exploitation are commonplace”.
Ofcom has not set a level at which age verification software needs to be effective (eg 90%), but it said it could do this in the future as it continues moves to enforce the Online Safety Act.
“For too long, many online services which allow porn and other harmful material have ignored the fact that children are accessing their services,” said Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive. “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.”
Since last June, Elon Musk’s Meta’s Instagram platform, overseen by Mark Zuckerberg, prohibits nudity.
Alumudena Lara, Ofcom’s policy director with responsibility for child protection, said: “It doesn’t matter where you are based, who your political allies are: if you operate in the UK, you need to comply with their rules.
“I am confident that in a few years time, we will look back and wonder: how did we think it was OK for children to be able to be exposed to this content?”
Ofcom said one possible age-check method that would avoid the need for a facial scan uses email addresses. Systems are available that cross-reference other services the address is associated with – for example, utility bills and financial institutions – to estimate the user’s age.
Automated facial age estimation does not cross-reference a user’s face with an image stored on a database but rather estimates age based on visual characteristics and no image is stored. Such software is already used by OnlyFans, a British-based subscription platform well-known for pornography.
On social media sites it is likely that “age gates” could apply at the level of the post rather than at social media account signup.
With thousands of porn providers around the world, cracking down on those that flout the Online Safety Act could prove difficult however.
“The challenge is if a number of sites are implementing (this), but then they’re seeing that others are not, and nothing is happening, then they will say, ‘Hey, why am I doing it?,’” said Lina. Ghazal, head of regulatory and public affairs VerifyMy, which provides checks using email and facial age estimation. “They have a real challenge here to make sure that Ofcom implements it across the board, effectively.”
The new rules also mean that sites must not allow any pornographic content to be visible before age checks are complete. Ofcom said that platforms must ensure that privacy rights are respected and adults can still access legal pornography, but it said it would “not hesitate to take action and launch investigations against services that do not engage or ultimately comply”.
