UK adopts new age verification rules for pornographic content

Following the implementation of 2017 Digital Economy Act, the United Kingdom’s Department for Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) has introduced new age verification rules in order to limit children’s exposure to pornographic content. Such regulations apply only to sites which make pornographic content available on a commercial basis. Hence, this excludes social media, image sharing platforms (e.g.Imgur, Tumblr, Twitter and Reddit) and sites where such content is available for free and where “it is reasonable for the age-verification regulator to assume that pornographic material makes up less than one-third of the content of the material made available.”