Is age verification on UK pornography viewing a good idea?

Why is it a good idea?

First, let’s look at the motivations for creating these new laws and the potential positives.

A key reason for the bill is to protect children from viewing explicit material accidentally, or being exposed to pornography excessively.

While research into the long-term effects of porn use is limited, it has been found to skew sexual expectations and sometimes lead to extreme fetishes. Users can also feel negatively about themselves, neglect other areas of their life, and become more aggressive.

Putting an age-restriction system in place would reduce porn consumption across the board – though this isn’t inherently a good thing – and more crucially prevent children from watching inappropriate content.

Another area of concern is misinformation. This new bill would make ‘knowingly false communications’ a legal offence – meaning articles or podcasts that willingly spread incorrect facts could face prosecution.

The intention here is to create less confusion and prevent worrying trends such as anti-vaccine movements and flat Earth groups from gaining even more momentum. Echo chambers and bot accounts continue to create dangerous narratives online that disrupt democracy and undermine our political systems.

By implementing some kind of legal repercussion, we may be able to see a reduction in poor information online.

What are the potential problems with this new rule?

Despite these seemingly sound reasons for introducing a bill, there are multiple issues with the legal terms used and the potential implications.

Digital rights groups, for example, argue that these new rules could wind up making the internet a less safe place. The Internet Society explains that the bill ‘will force service providers to weaken or remove encryption to meet new content identification requirements’.

Content moderation would mean less end-to-end encryption and worse security for users. Leaks and huge personal information dumps remain a large enough issue as it is – weakening already shaky infrastructure may lead to serious problems.

In addition, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee criticised the bill, stating that it ‘neither adequately protects freedom of expression nor is clear and robust enough to tackle illegal and harmful content’.

There is also the tricky question of free speech. How does a company, brand, or even government decide what is ‘threatening’, ‘illegal’, or ‘harmful’? These terms are subjective and without concrete guidelines, the ability to post freely and authentically could become very difficult.

We’ll have to see in the coming months how this new bill will work, both logistically and practically. For now, it’s best to keep your online activity as safe as possible via your own means – rather than relying on legislative protection.

It may be a while before anything comes into practice.