When Austrian-born porn star Marcello Bravo got on stage to host Europe’s premier adult industry awards in Amsterdam earlier in September, few in the crowd expected him to talk politics.
Addressing “Europe’s finest fornicators,” as he called the audience at XBIZ Amsterdam, Bravo delivered an opening monologue peppered with sex jokes. He then turned to a more serious matter: the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act.
Brits “have to hand over their entire personal lives just to enjoy a bit of online pornography these days!” Bravo (real name Markus Schlögl) joked. “It’s fucked up,” yelled an audience member. The crowd tittered.
The global adult industry has evolved alongside the internet, growing to hundreds of millions of users and even outflanking household names like TikTok and Amazon, at least according to some studies. Regulators, initially slow to address the industry’s unique challenges, have recently come of age.
In the past year, porn sites have come under scrutiny in the U.K., France, Italy and the European Union, fueled by a spiraling fear that minors are being exposed to harmful online content. Leaders from France’s Emmanuel Macron to the European Union’s Ursula von der Leyen have called for restrictions on children accessing certain parts of the internet, facilitated through age checks and bans.
The porn industry is pushing back. POLITICO spoke to a dozen performers and platform employees at the Amsterdam conference. While all agreed that children should not have access to adult content, most expressed significant concerns about how this principle is being implemented.
Keeping porn platforms in check
Over the summer, France and the U.K. put in place requirements for age checks on porn platforms, but gave leeway to use different techniques, ranging from checking IDs to facial estimation.
The European Commission said in non-binding guidelines over the summer that porn platforms should implement strict age checks and is investigating several of them for failing to do so.
The measures are “really just about control. It’s not actually about porn, but porn is a very good scapegoat,” said Christina Kastalia, a digital showgirl with a bachelor’s degree in law. “I see it [age verification regulations] more so as an attack to, literally, the entire society.” It’s not “just about porn. It’s about mass surveillance and it’s about control,” she said.
Kastalia echoed arguments made by numerous privacy-minded stakeholders and big porn platforms, who say that keeping minors away from adult content is a Trojan horse for heightened online surveillance.
Aylo Freesites, the parent company of Pornhub, RedTube and YouPorn, pulled its services in France in protest of the new age verification requirements. A French court rejected their challenge of the measures in an emergency opinion, prompting the company to resume operations pending a final ruling.
Requiring identification to watch naughty videos may result in significant drops in traffic — and therefore in their incomes — industry giant Pornhub has argued in the past.
But Madelaine Thomas, senior policy advisor at the Digital Intimacy Coalition, said there’s only been “a marginal blip in income” and traffic. Thomas was speaking for the many performers who don’t rely on free sites for their work.
Going underground
The porn industry is a giant in its own right, in Europe counting tens of millions of users, with some declaring over 100 million in transparency reports. Estimates place the sector’s global value at nearly $73 billion in 2023, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Pornhub, which releases annual statistics, says roughly half of its visitors are below the age of 34. France, meanwhile, is its second-largest market after the U.S.
But as porn has become an online ubiquity, it has also become more accessible to minors, raising concerns about addiction and distorted perceptions of gender relations, potentially leading to violence. TV shows like Adolescence have brought these worries to the forefront of the EU policy debate.
There are several methods for verifying users’ ages, including checking government identity documents or credit cards, as well as using photos of users.
Frequenters of porn sites are daunted by the prospect of uploading their ID or having their credit cards checked on the platforms, as opposed to having an app on their device that sends a signal to the platform, a technical solution championed by porn and social media companies.
When porn platforms enforce age verification, “what you’re really doing is driving the traffic to places that are further underground,” said Jupiter Jetson, an adult content creator.
While big platforms like Pornhub, XNXX, XVideos and Stripchat are in regulators’ crosshairs, smaller porn platforms have their own set of problems. Jetson stated that they don’t verify the age of performers or ensure that individuals in the videos consent to being filmed and having their content posted online.
On the user side, minors will always find a way around restrictions, Kastalia said.
Case in point: Downloads for virtual private networks, which allow users to bypass age verification requirements, skyrocketed in the U.K. and France before these countries put in verification requirements.
For porn stars and sex workers, the crusade to put age restrictions on accessing porn is a moralistic one — the latest attempt to shut the industry down on puritanical grounds.
At the end of the day, Jetson said, the age verification measures are not about protecting children but simply wanting to see sex workers and adult content performers “suffer.”
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