Do age verification laws work? Not according to this study.

A new working document of several university researchers suggests that age verification laws are not effective.

The age verification laws differ according to the State, but generally require that websites of websites with more than a third of explicit content present identification as proof of age. The forms of identification can vary from a digital identification to facial recognition. Since 2022, 19 states have approved age verification laws, all of which are in force, except those of Georgia, which will be in force as of July 1.

In January, the Supreme Court heard a case about the verification of age, Free Speech Coalition v. PAXTON. Your decision, which will probably come this summer, will affect the current and future laws of age verification.

Experts in freedom of expression and digital privacy agree that children should not have access to pornography, but they have told Mashable since 2023 that age verification laws will not work for that goal. Among other reasons, some pornographic sites that are not based on the US. Uu. They may not feel the need to comply with the law, and people can use VPN to pretend they are in another place.

Now, researchers from the middle and policy center at the University of New York and several other universities that investigate If these laws affect search behavior I have found the same.

The investigation suggests that age verification laws do not work

When analyzing Google Trends data, researchers found a traffic reduction of 46.6 percent of Pornhub searches, the largest platform that complies with laws. Pornhub has blocked most states with age verification laws due to the burden of complying with laws. In Louisiana, where Pornhub still operates while he meets, traffic has fallen 80 percent, his matrix company Aylo confirmed to Mashable. (Pornhub continues to operate in Louisana because the State has a digital identification that is used quite frequently, called Wallet.

Although Pornhub searches fell into these states, researchers saw a 48.1 percent increase in searches for a large non -compliant platform, XVIDEOS (which did not respond to the request for Mashable Comments) and an increase of 23.6 percent in VPN searches. This happened in the states with age verification laws in a rolling timeline based on when the laws were promulgated.

This shows that when it comes to the regulation of the Internet that is mainly impacting access, there are unwanted consequences, said Zeve Sanderson, co -author and executive director of the Nyu Social and Political Media Center, in an interview with Mashable. One is the substitution effect, which undermines the potential efficacy of policies. This is seen here with explicit websites, but it was also evident by the Tiktokkers going mass for Rednote when Tiktok users thought the ban was imminent.

“In Louisiana last year, Pornhub was one of the few places to comply with the new law. Since then, our traffic in Louisiana fell approximately 80 percent. These people did not stop looking for porn,” Aylo told Mashable in a statement sent by email. “They simply emigrated to the darkest corners of the Internet that do not ask users to verify age, not to follow the law, that they do not seriously take user security, and that they often do not even moderate content. In practice, the laws have made the Internet more dangerous for adults and children.”

Aylo declared that he has publicly supported the age verification, but the way in which many jurisdictions have chosen to implement it is “ineffective, casual and dangerous.” He pointed out the risk of security and privacy of requiring the websites to collect a large amount of highly sensitive personal information (from the names of people to the content they consume). Like the defenders of freedom of expression, Mashable has previously spoken, Aylo declared that the best solution to prevent children from seeing explicit content are the filters at the device level.

Study search trends for porn sites

The researchers used a method called synthetic control to analyze the results of the trends. Basically, they created a “digital twin” or a synthetic version of the State to show what could have happened if the State had not approved these laws. To ensure that their results were robust, they also used a multiverse analysis and adjusted the dates they used. Their results were maintained.

However, as the authors explain in the document, there are some limitations to use Google trends to measure the efficacy of politics. On the one hand, Google Trends data does not measure visits to the website or real web traffic. Nor can you account for actions such as writing a URL in a browser and going to a website directly.

The researchers could not differentiate the age search results, which is the main component of these laws. However, the question of whether these laws are impacting the behavior of minors is probably unanswered, due to ethical and legal concerns of exposing minors to explicit content.

Google Trends measures search behavior, and Previous research cited on paper confirms that it is reliable to track behavior patterns at the population level. These researchers also carried out a correlation analysis and found a strong correlation between the volume of Google’s trends and the real traffic data of Pornhub and XVIDEOS of similar.

The study has not yet been reviewed or published in a magazine, but the authors wanted to publish it as a working document now because the decision of the Supreme Court has not yet decreased and because the states continue to discuss this issue, Sanderson said.

“Given how fast this regulatory space moves, we wanted to contribute when it was more significant, not in the timeline of the magazine’s publication,” he continued. The results will be updated once Scotus decides.

For now, however, these initial findings propose that, as experts warned, age verification laws do not achieve their planned purpose.

This “first large -scale empirical analysis of these laws suggests that they are probably not achieving their declared objectives,” Sanderson said, “and in any case, he could be encouraging more risky behavior.”