Pornography: Internet

(asked on 16th July 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, on how many occasions the Government has received representations from people in other jurisdictions wanting to learn about the age verification model presented by Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 to date.


Answered by
Caroline Dinenage Portrait
Caroline Dinenage
This question was answered on 21st July 2020

The government is committed to ensuring children are protected from accessing inappropriate content online. As we announced on 16 October last year, the government has decided that the policy objective of protecting children online from age inappropriate content can be best delivered through our wider online harms proposals. Our Online Harms proposals will deliver a higher level of protection for children and we expect companies to use a proportionate range of tools, including age assurance and age verification technologies, to prevent children accessing age-inappropriate content such as online pornography. This approach will achieve a more consistent and comprehensive approach to harmful content across different sites and go further than the Digital Economy Act’s focus on online pornography on commercial adult sites.

We will publish a Full Government Response to the Online Harms White Paper consultation later this year. We will follow the full Government Response with legislation, which we are working on at pace, and will be introduced when parliamentary time allows.

The British Board of Film Classification, while designated as the age verification regulator under the Digital Economy Act, commissioned research on children’s access to pornographic content online. The research, published in early 2020, explored young people’s interactions with, and attitudes towards, online pornography and age verification. We will continue to develop our evidence base on online harms ahead of the implementation of the new online harms regulatory framework.

As a result of Covid-19 lockdown measures we expect more people, including children, to be spending more time online. Although it is too early to confidently analyse patterns from this period, there is universal concern about child online safety. We are working closely with technology companies, law enforcement and civil society to monitor trends, and to support users to understand and manage the risks and benefits of being online during this period.

Ministers and officials have regular meetings and discussions with a wide range of stakeholders, including children’s charities, on a variety of issues. We engaged with a number of children’s charities on our proposals to protect children through the new online harms regulatory framework, as part of our wider public consultation on the Online Harms White Paper last year. Details of Ministerial meetings are published quarterly on the Gov.uk website.

Reticulating Splines