PARIS — Top adult tube sites in France were summoned Monday by the country’s Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel, a regulatory government body similar to the American FCC, and ordered to “prevent minors from accessing their content before the end of the year” under penalty of being deplatformed by internet service providers.
As XBIZ reported Monday, the news was leaked to a journalist before the announcement, although the timeline seems to have been tightened by two weeks, forcing tube sites to act during the country’s holiday vacation.
Pornhub, Tukif, xHamster, XVideos and XNXX were ordered, via formal notices published on the CSA website, to immediately implement some form of age verification, leading French newspaper Le Monde reported.
The CSA claims it is acting in the name of "its mission of protecting minors."
“In the event of non-compliance with this obligation within 15 days,” Le Monde reported, “the sites run the risk of total blocking of their access in France.”
A CSA representative told wire service Agence France-Presse that the agency's decisions “appeal to the responsibility of operators who must put in place the necessary measures to prevent minors from accessing their content. A minor, and in particular a child who finds himself in front of unsuitable content, such as pornographic content, can be lastingly, at the very least, shocked.”
The age-verification provision, added to a hastily approved domestic violence law during an atypical and sparsely attended COVID-era session of the French Parliament in July 2020, specifies that adult companies should be required to institute measures beyond simply asking an internet user if they are of age.
The law allows a government official, the president of the CSA, to demand that the president of the judicial court order the ISP providers to immediately block infringing sites in the entire country.
Effort Spearheaded by Self-Appointed 'Children's Rights' Groups
The CSA action was prompted late last month by three nonprofit groups purporting to represent children’s rights: the Observatoire de la Parentalité et de l’Éducation Numérique, the Union Nationale des Associations Familiales and the Conseil Français des Associations Pour les Droits de l’Enfant. The groups identified eight “pornographic sites” they said should be censored for alleged violations of the July 2020 law.
Several other groups, with unclear agendas but also claiming to support “protecting children,” are also spearheading attempts to prevent French people from accessing what the groups consider “pornographic websites,” which may include any site that may feature explicit sexual expression, like Twitter.
Justine Atlan, a spokesperson for one of the organizations, e-Enfance, told AFP that “it is important to put pressure on pornographic sites so that they cannot continue to violate the legal framework of the industry they have chosen, which stipulates not to expose minors to pornography.”
Atlan claims that “the current internet pornography has more violent content, ‘revenge porn’ and sex without consent. This has consequences on the sexual practices that young people reproduce — brutality, problem of consent, pressure [linked to] performance.”
Similar initiatives have been announced in the U.K. and Germany to prevent access to adult tube sites.
Le Monde is also currently publishing a series of reports exposing what it considers to be predatory practices in the French adult industry. The reports appear to be timed in order to influence public opinion to support the actions of the “children’s rights” groups and their allies within the CSA.