Last week, I deliberately broke my website to remove accessibility features for UK users. I had been recording audio of erotic stories to enable blind users to enjoy the same content as sighted users, but now there is a geo-block which prevents them from playing these files. This is one of many – hopefully unintended – consequences of the Online Safety Act (OSA).
It isn’t easy for governments to produce good laws when it comes to technology. The landscape is vast and ever-changing, and lawmakers are rarely subject experts, so the consequences of internet regulation are not always apparent until enforcement begins.
The Online Safety Act is a piece of UK legislation that seeks to ‘reduce online harms’, a broad aim that results in a vast and complex piece of legislation. It claims to do many of the things the layperson (or average politician) could want in terms of internet regulation, from making site owners more proactive in taking down harmful content to compelling age verification on porn sites to protect children.
As with so many attempts to do these things, the practical implementation of the law turns out to be a horrible mess.
My sex blog has been online since 2011. In 2017, after a couple of blind users had pointed out that the stories weren’t as sexy when read in the robotic tones of a screen reader, I began recording posts as audio to make them more accessible. Over the years, that project has grown, and now I train and commission other bloggers to record their own work for the same purpose.
Unfortunately for us, the way the OSA defines ‘pornography’ leads to an absurd situation where now UK users are allowed to read the text of the stories (and even use a text-to-speech generator to enjoy them if they want) but they may not access the audio recordings of real people reading them aloud.
What counts as ‘pornography’ under the Online Safety Act
The Online Safety Act defines ‘pornography’ in broad, vague terms which seem bizarrely fixated on format rather than the content itself. Text is out of scope, as is text accompanied by a ‘gif’.
Legal minds are baffled as to why the UK government specified a particular image format – does this mean that a png or jpeg counts as ‘porn’ where a gif would not? We don’t know.
For now most of us are assuming that ‘gif’ means ‘any form of image’. Video content counts as ‘porn’, and audio files are also in scope, though it is not clear whether the intent is to cover audio files of people having (or simulating) sex, or whether that definition includes audio like mine which provides the exact same content as the text, which is perfectly legal.
This leads to the bizarre outcome explained above: I have had to deliberately break this accessibility feature for UK users, in case Ofcom issue me with a fine.
To the layperson, it might seem that an age-verification (AV) law for porn would primarily be aimed at the large tube sites. When the political arguments are made for these kinds of laws, it is usually the big providers like Pornhub, RedTube, xHamster etc in the firing line.
At the time of writing, though, all these sites seem to be running exactly as they always have done.
Ben Tasker, who has completed assessments for his Mastodon instance in line with the Online Safety Act, has suggested that because they predominantly publish user-uploaded content, sites like Pornhub may be classed as ‘user to user’ services and therefore exempted from the obligation to age verify.
Meanwhile, much smaller sites have also made the difficult decision to limit access or break functionality for UK users to avoid falling foul of the law.
My colleague Molly Moore has run Sinful Sunday since 2011 – a body-positive art photography project which encourages bloggers and photographers to share photographs of themselves to counteract some of the harmful stereotypes that come from mainstream porn. I asked her what steps she’s taken to comply with the Online Safety Act.
“I have blocked access to my site from IP addresses in the UK. I don’t make any money directly from my site so I can’t afford any of the age verification tools required to do anything else. In the short term, that means my site and the Sinful Sunday project are not accessible to anyone in the UK, whether that be my readers or other bloggers who joined in. In the long term, I fear that this will be the end of Sinful Sunday: without contributors, it is essentially dead. 14 years of community building and sex-positive photography brought to a close by the OSA.”
Age verification technology
Why not just implement age verification? As Molly explains, the cost is simply too high for small websites. On top of the up-front investment to add the technology to any given site, there is usually a per-user charge for each person verified.
Even if the price is low it quickly adds up: I contacted a company that runs UK-government-compliant age checks, and they suggested fees of around 30 pence per user. To a small blog that gets 1000 UK users per month that’s £300 – an unmanageable sum for anyone who blogs as a hobby. For a website the size of mine, age-verifying UK users would cost more in one month than the whole site earns in three.
This isn’t the only indication that the law is drafted with bigger players in mind. When specifying the fines that the regulator Ofcom can impose for non-compliance, the Act states that operators like myself will be liable for fines of up to 10% of our net profits or £18 million – whichever is greater.
Ofcom does have some discretionary power in terms of the fines it can levy, so it’s unlikely they would hit me for £18 million, but it is not a risk that I or many of my colleagues are willing to take.
Given the chilling effect of this potential punishment, it is perhaps unsurprising that so many site owners are resorting to cheap (or free) workarounds that break functionality instead. Leaving UK users with a poorer experience, and often a less accessible one.
User experience and the OSA
Over the coming months, as more adult websites roll out changes, we’ll start to see more bizarre decisions being made. The deadline for compliance is March 16, so expect to see changes coming into effect from the end of this week. Images being deliberately broken or hidden, audio or video disabled, and even sometimes websites blocked in their entirety to those browsing from a UK IP address.
For a user, there are tools that can help people get around these content blocks, but as I’m an adult content provider myself, Ofcom’s guidance prohibits me from mentioning them. More UK users will likely start using these tools, as Ofcom begins enforcement and the extent of the damage becomes clear.
What will also happen more often over the coming months is that small websites, forums and services will simply choose to shut down. Even if they aren’t providing adult content, the Online Safety Act places onerous responsibilities on site owners to perform impact assessments to ensure the safety of users and the difficulty of doing these combined with the size of fines that can be levied against non-compliant sites means many are choosing to simply close (or geo-block UK users) to avoid the risk.
Over at OnlineSafetyAct.co.uk – a non-profit info-based website run by lawyer Neil Brown – there is a page collating some of the shutdown announcements. It appears the law is causing the death of many sites, from small sustainability forums to online games and Mastodon instances.
How to fix the Online Safety Act
So what’s the solution? The Open Rights Group are actively campaigning for small websites to be exempt from the Online Safety Act. This is a neat and simple solution to at least some of the problems with the OSA, though it’s not clear that this would affect anyone who posts erotic media.
Personally, I’d like to see far more clarity from Ofcom around what exactly ‘counts’ as pornography, ideally with an acknowledgement that if a particular piece of media is exempt in text form, then it is also exempt in audio because providing content in multiple formats is one of the core principles of making a website accessible.
The UK’s Equality Act 2010 has plenty to say about making ‘reasonable adjustments’ for disability, which is partly why it seems so bizarre that this law focuses on content format – to the obvious detriment of disabled people.
More broadly, it would be good to see the government giving clear guidance on what exactly ‘counts’ as porn that requires age verification. Because if the answer is ‘small, independent websites that post accessible erotica and body-positive photography but not the big tube sites’ then they should say so.
The end – or slow death – of these sites is one of the main consequences of this law as it starts to come into effect. We can only hope it is an unintended one.
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