Iain Corby of the industry group the Age Verification Providers Association said that if the policy was poorly enforced by Ofcom it could punish pornography websites that comply with the law. Outlets that fail to prove they have robust age checks could be fined 10% of their global revenue by the media regulator Ofcom, or risk being blocked altogether by British internet service providers.Īccording to industry sources, the big fear among major porn sites is what happens if they comply with the law but smaller sites remain online without age checks. The proposed law will see individual British internet users required to hand over a form of identification – such as a passport, driving licence or credit card – to an age verification provider, which would then tell a website hosting porn that the user is over 18. Facebook and Instagram have strict bans on pornography, while Tumblr removed all adult material from its service in 2018. Pornography has been increasingly pushed off mainstream social networks. Neither site currently has substantive age checks to access adult material. This could leave Twitter and Reddit facing a choice of either verifying which British users are over 18 or finding a way to remove adult material from their services in the UK.