NEW YORK — A group of university researchers has published a study whose findings suggest that age verification laws are ineffective at achieving their stated goal of preventing minors from accessing adult content.
In states that have passed AV laws, some adult websites, including Pornhub, have opted to block access rather than shoulder the legal burden of compliance.
A representative for Pornhub parent company Aylo told Mashable that after the company complied with local AV laws in Louisiana, the site's traffic dropped 80% in that state.
Focusing on search behavior as an indicator of adult content viewing habits, researchers at New York University's Center for Social Media & Politics found that searches for Pornhub dropped 51% in states with AV laws, while searches for noncompliant platforms rose by 48.1%, and searches for VPN services rose by 23.6%.
In other words, people living in states with AV laws who did not want to submit identifying information to prove their age did not stop watching porn.
Instead, according to Aylo's statement to Mashable, "They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don't ask users to verify age, that don't follow the law, that don't take user safety seriously, and that often don't even moderate content. In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children."
Aylo's statement takes issue with the way many states have chosen to implement AV laws, calling said implementation "ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous." The company believes that children should be shielded from porn, but that the best way to do that is for parents to employ content filters on individual devices.
To test the effectiveness of the laws, the researchers created a "digital twin" — a computer simulation — of each state, and compared actual observed search trends in those states with their model of what search trends in those states would have looked like had they not passed AV laws.
This revealed that users faced with an age verification requirement to view an adult site searched for alternative sites that did not require age verification, and for methods of circumventing age verification, such as using a VPN.
The team then used multiverse analysis, a technique that considers alternative research approaches to the same question, to confirm that its findings remained reliable under various scenarios.
While the researchers admitted that using Google Trends is inherently flawed due to the limitations of its data — for instance, it is not possible to know what percentage of users searching for AV-noncompliant sites or VPNs may have been minors — the study nonetheless concluded that AV laws were ineffective, since users in states with such laws simply seek alternative ways to access adult content.
They also noted that such laws effectively punish compliant sites and function to limit general access to adult content, not just minors' access.
"Our findings highlight that while these regulation efforts reduce traffic to compliant firms and likely a net reduction overall to this type of content, individuals adapt primarily by moving to content providers that do not require age verification," the study reports.
Numerous backers of the current spate of state AV laws have asserted that when adult sites withdraw completely from states with such laws, it indicates that the laws are “effective” or “working” — contentions that imply the goal is to prevent anyone from viewing adult content, rather than just minors.