The Online Safety Act came into force in July 2025. For millions of British adults, the next time they visited a porn site, they were met with a new demand: prove your age. The legislation was designed to protect young people. But at what cost?
The aim of the Online Safety Act was noble, if simplistic: to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content. The reality of the legislation was more nuanced.
Age verification is easy to frame as a bureaucratic inconvenience. A few extra clicks, a quick selfie, and a minor friction point. However, within that pause, there are privacy concerns, hidden shame, and the feeling that autonomy is lost. While that was not likely to be what the legislators intended, the effect of this Act stretches far beyond a one-time process.
We spoke to three adults who use adult content sites, as well as Chloë Bean, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Their accounts suggest the psychological cost of this legislation, for both adults and young people, has been underestimated and widely misunderstood.
The immediate impact of the Act
The change happened overnight, and not everyone was prepared. We spoke to a 31-year-old man who noticed the shift a week after the legislation came in. He visited a porn site and was prompted to verify his age. He completed the process; having his photo taken with the platform, estimating that he was over the age of 18. To save time, he now logs into an existing account where he has already verified his age, whenever he wants to access adult content.
A 35-year-old woman we spoke to was not caught off guard. She had been tracking the Act’s progress on social media before it came into effect and had prepared in advance. She signed up for a paid subscription to Bellesa, a porn platform aimed at women. The subscription means she rarely encounters verification prompts now. However, it does mean her viewing is tied to a membership account rather than kept entirely anonymous.
Of course, it’s not just everyday users who have been impacted by the legislation. A 30-year-old woman who works in the adult content industry was aware of the change from a professional perspective as much as a personal one. She spoke about the damaging effect the surveillance had on users’ perception of the industry, and how it affected her income directly.
Policymakers are naive if they think this will deter people from using porn sites. It won't have the intended effect and will only stigmatise the industry further, she explained. It has already affected my income and eroded customer trust in platforms like OnlyFans and Fansly.
Most people want to use those sites without it being traceable back to them personally. Older users in particular are far more reluctant to hand over that kind of information, which creates another barrier to subscribing.
That erosion of trust is not incidental. Being asked to identify yourself when accessing a site can have a significant psychological impact. Users likely access adult sites in their most private moments, often when they are pleasuring themselves either alone or with a partner. Having to stop and provide identification changes the relationship they have with this medium.
When access requires identity verification, it introduces a moment of pause, and that can shift the experience from something private and anonymous to something more deliberate, explains Bean. For some, that may reduce impulsive use. For others, it could heighten anxiety or increase secrecy and shame. When behaviour feels monitored, even indirectly, people tend to relate to it differently.
The potential risk of age verification
Bean draws a clear distinction between the policy and the psychological message it sends to users. Having to prove your identity before accessing legal content says something to the person accessing it, whether the legislation intends it to or not. The barrier tells the user that what they are doing is out of the ordinary, or shameful, before they’ve even clicked “Enter”.
If accessing legal content requires proving your identity, it subtly communicates that the behaviour is risky or questionable, says Bean. Many adults already carry shame around sexuality. Adding a verification layer can amplify the sense that this is something that needs to be tracked or examined. Shame tends to increase when people feel observed. It's less about the policy itself and more about the meaning it creates for the person.
That idea showed up in the responses we got from adults. None of the people we spoke to described the age verification process as neutral. The 31-year-old shared a brief moment of calculation about risk and consequence, before ultimately deciding that it was worth the risk.
I had to decide whether I cared if my porn history got leaked, he explained. I concluded the worst outcome would be being made fun of for a while. I wasn't keen on entering card details, but a face photo didn't bother me.
The 35-year-old drew a much harder line, choosing not to submit to ID-based verification. Her reasons speak directly to Bean's point about the psychological weight of surveillance.
I don't trust that the government has selected verification companies that can protect that data from leaks, or that they won't sell it or repurpose it, she shared. I also don't trust that viewing data won't be used against people in the future, particularly those with unusual, though entirely legal, sexual tastes.
The data anxiety the government didn’t account for
Privacy concern around age verification is not irrational. Last year, 40% of UK businesses experienced a cyber breach or attack. The threat of private data being shared without users’ consent is entirely valid. What’s more, the way in which people respond to the possibility of exposure in any area of life that carries social risk is well-documented.
The fear that private sexual behaviour could become public can activate a low-level stress response, even when the actual risk is low, explains Bean. When privacy feels unpredictable, the nervous system shifts into hypervigilance.
However, in the accounts we gathered, this anxiety didn’t always correlate with a high assessment of actual risk. For example, the 31-year-old explicitly framed his data concerns in relative terms, comparing the security of a major porn site to smaller retailers.
I've bought from so many companies with almost certainly terrible security that worrying specifically about PornHub feels irrational, he explained. I'd be surprised if a major porn site had worse data security than some random hardware or jewellery shop online.
The 35-year-old reached a similar conclusion, only from a slightly different angle. Her distrust centred less on the platforms themselves and more on the government-contracted verification companies sitting between the user and the site. The distinction she made matters.
The legislation has created a new category of data handler, purpose-built to process information about adult content consumption, and tasked third-party companies with managing it. For users who already approached data sharing with caution, this new architecture is far from reassuring.
How the legislation shifts users’ habits
While the new legislation is unlikely to stop users from consuming adult content, it may change their habits. The responses we collected show some have already changed how they watch it and often where they watch it, too.
Typically, when something is restricted, it doesn't disappear, says Bean. It goes underground and gets found another way. Curiosity doesn't switch off because access becomes harder. From a nervous system perspective, secrecy can actually increase intensity and curiosity.
The 35-year-old watches adult content less often and now exclusively uses Bellesa, finding the available range smaller than she was used to. She has moved partly toward audio platforms like Dipsea and Quinn. The adult industry worker uses a VPN to circumvent the age verification restriction. The 31-year-old logs in to an existing account and carries on as before. People are still accessing adult content; they have simply had to find a new way of doing so.
Restriction pushing content underground, instead of eliminating it, applies to adults. Of course, for young people, the consequences are similar in nature, but considerably more serious.
The problem with normalising surveillance
Beyond the immediate practical effects of age verification, Bean raises a question about what it means to build surveillance into the infrastructure of sexual exploration. Adults often access content as a way to safely explore their fantasies and fetishes. The feeling of being observed, whether true or not, changes things.
Being watched can either suppress a behaviour or paradoxically intensify it, because of the psychological push and pull happening internally, says Bean. For those without shame or privacy concerns, the impact may be minimal. For those with trauma histories, religious shame, or fear of exposure, the psychological effects could be significantly stronger.
While the law is supposed to protect young people, it only addresses part of the problem. As Bean explains, when something becomes taboo, it can be both arousing and shameful. Blocking access to the content without giving proper context, education, or support is not enough.
The most harm tends to come not from exposure alone, but from early exposure without guidance, combined with shame, secrecy, and difficult family or cultural relationships to sexuality, alongside traumatic experiences, she explains. Policies are most effective when they work in layers: access limitations, education, parental engagement, and open dialogue.
The legislation asked a technical question: how do we stop people under 18 from accessing explicit content online? It answered that question with an identity verification system.
But what it didn’t ask was what happens on a psychological level when sexuality is placed behind a surveillance checkpoint. That is the question policymakers should now be answering.
New rules that decide who can buy, sell and see sex online