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6 hours ago
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If you’ve seen porn in recent years, you’ll know it’s grim out there these days. Incest and strangulation are rife, as is coercion, racism, and also sexual violence. It’s front and centre on mainstream porn sites and many social media platforms, pushed by recommendation algorithms on a drive to maximise engagement and profit. It’s a world away from the days when “hardcore” porn meant an erect penis. But we might be on the brink of change.
Last week the long-awaited independent porn review led by the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin was published, marking the biggest review of pornography regulation in more than 40 years. Its findings amount to a clear indictment of what counts as porn today and the inaction of successive governments to do anything to fix it. It was a Labour government which first brought in the extreme porn law in 2009, recognising the need for a step-change in how we regulate pornography. It’s now time for the next great step forward, and it’s one that will be integral to the success of the government’s mission to halve violence against women and girls in a decade.
The public appetite for regulation has shifted. For a while, many believed that a hands-off approach to regulation would strengthen our sexual freedoms and protect our right to privacy. In reality, it’s done the opposite. Most pornography today suppresses our sexual freedom. What we watch is driven largely not by user choice and preference but profit-driven AI recommendation algorithms that have learned we are drawn to material that invokes disgust, shock and rage.
Our privacy rights have been trampled by multinational porn conglomerates who have had free range to mine some of our most intimate data to feed these algorithms. One study of over 22,000 porn sites found that 93% of them were sending user data to at least one third party, often without users knowing.
We have started to recognise the impact of this across much of our other online activity. In 2020, a review into bias in algorithmic decision-making commissioned by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, found that racist and sexist attitudes are not just reproduced but produced by recommendation algorithms. And the information commissioner has now launched an investigation into how social media platforms are using data generated by children’s online activity to serve them content.
This is partly how we’ve got to a place where so much online porn promotes and perpetuates harmful, violent, misogynistic and racist tropes. The porn platforms themselves are implicated in producing these preferences, pushing men and increasingly women further than we would otherwise go.
While Lady Bertin’s report doesn’t delve deep enough into algorithmic decision-making on porn sites and its impact on our freedom and privacy, it does provide a blueprint for what needs to change. Its most important recommendation is the establishment of parity between what is regulated offline and what is regulated online. It also suggests that platforms are mandated to adopt specific safety-by-design measures, via the development of a safe pornography code in the Online Safety Act, or a new publications offence. Alongside this, it recommends that pornography depicting incest or strangulation should be made illegal under the extreme pornography act, and that the Home Office is the natural home for pornography policy, creating a clear route for oversight and accountability and ending the “pass the buck” approach to regulation that has dominated debate so far.
The report also contains a passing mention of support for device-level age verification, if the measures to restrict children’s access to porn sites in the Online Safety Act prove ineffective. Far from a simple difference, this shift significantly alters who is responsible for keeping kids safe; from the platforms that profit from their access, on to parents and carers who would have to keep them away from any verified devices. It isn’t a better option, and it definitely isn’t a safer system; unsurprisingly, the porn platforms prefer it, because it would do less harm to their traffic.
On publication of the report, the government announced they will respond to each recommendation in due course. The review marks the kind of opportunity we would say comes once in a lifetime. Except it has come before. As prime minister in 2013, David Cameron announced that, when it comes to porn, “what you can’t get in a shop, you shouldn’t be able to get online”. Twelve years later, Lady Bertin’s first recommendation is the same: that pornographic content that is illegal to distribute in physical formats should also be treated as illegal content on online platforms. It’s taken us over a decade to end up in the same place. It’s not that we don’t know what needs to be done. We just need this government to finally step up and actually do it.
Clare McGlynn also contributed to this article
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Fiona Vera-Gray is a professor of sexual violence at London Metropolitan University and co-director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit
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Clare McGlynn is a professor of law at Durham University and expert on the legal regulation of pornography
