Study: Age-Verification Laws Don't Work
At least not if the goal is keeping minors from viewing porn.
Laws requiring porn websites to verify user ages and block people under age 18 have been spreading like a contagion around the United States. Proponents say they're necessary to curb minors' access to pornography, even if it means sacrificing adults' privacy. Detractors argue that not only do these laws infringe on protected speech, they won't even work at accomplishing their stated goal of stopping young people from viewing adult content. They may even make matters worse, by driving adults and minors alike to websites working outside of U.S. standards and regulations.
A new working paper suggests the detractors are right.
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The paper details research looking at how age-verification laws impact "digital behavior across four key dimensions: searches for the largest compliant website, the largest non-compliant website, VPN services, and adult content generally."
Since 2023, at least 18 states have adopted laws requiring websites that display sexually oriented content to essentially check IDs of all visitors. States requiring age verification for online adult content now include (in order of their laws passing) Louisiana, Utah, Mississippi, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, Texas, North Carolina, Indiana, Idaho, Florida, Kentucky, Nebraska, Georgia, Alabama, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee. These laws have already taken effect in all of these states except Georgia, which is set to start enforcing its age-verification law on July 1.
Researchers led by David Lang of Stanford University's Polarization and Social Change Lab looked at Google Trends data from all of these states.
They found first that the passage of age-verification laws corresponded to a significant reduction in searchers for Pornhub, the dominant porn platform complying with these laws.
That's what proponents of age-verification laws want, right?
Not so fast. The passage of such laws was also linked to significant increases in searches for XVideos, the dominant porn platform noncompliant with these laws.
The researchers also found age-verification laws linked to an increase in searches for virtual private network (VPN) services, which can mask a user's location, thereby allowing people in states where age-verification laws exist to appear as if they're visiting websites from within a state where no such laws exist.
"Our findings highlight that while these regulation efforts reduce traffic to compliant firms and likely a net reduction overall to this type of content, individuals adapt primarily by moving to content providers that do not require age verification," states the paper.
"The three-month results demonstrate a 51% reduction in searches for the largest compliant platform, accompanied by increases in searches for the next largest non-compliant platform (48.1%) and VPN (23.6%) services," it notes.
"We find that users in affected states simply shift their habits by searching for non-compliant sites or ways to circumvent the laws," posted Zeve Sanderson, executive director of New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics and one of the paper's researchers, on X.
"While age-verification laws may successfully reduce traffic to regulated platforms, they also appear to drive users toward potentially less regulated & more dangerous alternatives," Sanderson commented.
The researchers note in their paper that using Google Trend data to study porn consumption habits is not perfect, since it observes "changes in search patterns but cannot definitively determine whether these changes translate to meaningful differences in site access" and "cannot compute the true extent to which these laws affect actual visitation to the targeted websites."
"Additionally, users may access sites through direct URLs, bookmarks, or other means that bypass search engines entirely, meaning that our analysis potentially understates or misses important behavioral adaptations," they write. "Finally, a crucial limitation is our inability to differentiate users by age. Since Google Trends data is aggregated and anonymized, we cannot determine whether observed changes in search behavior are driven by the intended target of these regulations (i.e. minors) or reflect broader behavioral shifts across all age groups."
Nonetheless, the researchers suggest that this raises important considerations for policymakers, since it highlights "the importance of monitoring unintended consequences, particularly the potential shift of users toward less regulated or potentially more dangerous platforms."
What's more, "the implications of these findings extend beyond the immediate context of adult content regulation," they write. "As states increasingly adopt digital access restrictions across various domains—from social media age verification to platform-specific bans—understanding how users adapt to such regulations becomes crucial for effective policy design."
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