The European Union is imposing stricter age-verification requirements, alongside other restrictions, on three of the world’s largest pornography sites.
Pornhub, XVideos and Stripchat have been designated by E.U. regulators as “Very Large Online Platforms” (VLOPs), a designation automatically conferred to sites which generate at least 45 million monthly active users.
Under the E.U.’s Digital Services Act, VLOPs must follow a firm set of rules designed to moderate content and protect site users — rules that are stricter than those applied to smaller platforms.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) came into force in November 2022 in an effort to mitigate the flow of illegal content and the mounting risk to public security. Mainstream sites like Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok have already earned the VLOP designation.
The DSA requires “more diligent content moderation” from VLOPs, demanding such platforms “take measures to address risks linked to the dissemination of illegal content online.” The “strong protection of minors” is a particularly high priority under the DSA. VLOPs are required “to redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety of minors.”
Major porn sites with a VLOP designation will be required to stop the spread of illegal content on their platforms, such as deepfake pornography and child sex abuse material. The sites will also have to ensure that minors cannot access their content and conduct regular risk assessments. VLOPs are also subject to external audits, which require them to produce transparency reports on content moderation decisions.
Explicit sites with a VLOP designation will also be held liable if minors are able to view their content. In response to this rule, sites like Pornhub will have to build out stricter age-verification requirements before a user can access the site’s content.
As of July 31, 2023, Pornhub has 33 million average monthly recipients of the service in the European Union, calculated as an average over the period of the past six months,” a Pornhub spokesman told the New York Post.
Legal measures that create liability for pornographic websites have been proven effective in the past.
Earlier this year, Utah passed a law requiring tech companies to verify that all users are at least 18 years old. The law stipulated stricter regulations for sites with explicit content, only a government-issued ID displaying the user’s age could enable access. Rather than comply with Utah’s stipulations — or face legal prosecution — Pornhub blocked access to its site for all users in Utah.
Despite the efforts of states like Utah, the United States still trumps all other nations in user traffic to pornographic sites like Pornhub.