Pornhub is investigated in child protection probe

Daily Mail​

4 days ago

Pornhub, along with three other major pornography websites, is being investigated over suspicions they have breached the bloc's online content rules which include provisions for protecting children from the explicit material.
The European Commission, the EU's executive branch, said it had opened formal proceedings against Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX and XVideos under the 27-nation bloc's Digital Safety Act.
The sweeping rulebook, also known as the DSA, requires internet companies and online platforms to do more to protect users, under threat of fines worth up to six per cent of annual global revenue.
The commission said protecting young users online was one of the DSA's priorities and it would now carry out an in-depth investigation into the companies 'as a matter of priority'.
The investigation would focus on the risks to protection of minors, including dangers associated with the lack of effective age verification measures.
It said the pornography sites had failed to put in place 'appropriate and proportionate measures' to a high-level safety and security for minors, especially when it came to age verification tools designed to prevent minors from getting to adult content.
The sites also lacked 'risk assessment and mitigation measures' of any negative effects, including on users' mental and physical well-being, the commission said.
Pornhub, XNXX, Stripchat and XVideos were classed as 'very large online platforms' that faced the highest level of scrutiny under the DSA.
But the commission said it had granted Stripchat's request to be removed from the list because it did not have enough users.
The four sites did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
Officials said the EU was also working on its own age verification app that online platforms could use to verify if a user was over the age of 18, without revealing any other personal information.
It would be available by the summer.
The investigation comes after the commission held a public consultation on draft online child protection measures that included proposals for age verification and 'age estimation' methods to block young people from inappropriate content.
Along with the bloc-wide scrutiny of big sites, smaller pornography platforms would also face supervision from individual EU member countries' digital regulators, the commission said.
It comes after Ofcom, at the beginning of the month, launched investigations into two pornographic websites it believed may be falling foul of the UK's child safety rules.
The regulator said Itai Tech Ltd - which operates a so-called 'nudifying' site - and Score Internet Group LLC had failed to detail how they were preventing children from accessing their platforms.
Ofcom announced in January that, in order to comply with the Online Safety Act, all websites on which pornographic material could be found must introduce 'robust' age-checking techniques from July.
It said the two services it was investigating did not appear to have any effective age checking mechanisms.
The regulator said on Friday that many services publishing their own porn content had, as required, provided details of 'highly effective age assurance methods' they were planning to implement.
They added that this 'reassuringly' included some of the largest services that fall under the rules.
It said a small number of services had also blocked UK users entirely to prevent children accessing them.
Under the Online Safety Act, platforms that publish their own pornographic content were required to take steps to implement age checks from January.
These can include requiring UK users to provide photo ID or running credit card checks.
But all websites where a user might encounter pornographic material are also required to demonstrate the robustness of the measures they are taking to verify the age of users.