The trouble with online porn: it’s impossible to block

Governments continue to tackle online porn as a policy and technology problem. The latest attempt comes from the Philippines, where the government’s National Telecommunications Commission confirmed to CNN that it had blocked access to some porn sites.

The agency’s concern focuses on child abuse images, which are prohibited under the country’s Republic Act 9775, but reports suggest that it is blocking several of the largest adult porn sites on the web.

All ISPs have been instructed to block certain sites, the agency said. Reports suggested that PornHub, Xvideos and Red Tube were among those blocked by Smart and Sun Cellular Mobile Data. Online chat revealed that some ISPs were still letting viewers through, however, which highlights one of the problems surrounding porn blocking: it isn’t that easy to do.

The Philippine government isn’t the only one to have tangled with porn censorship. Others have taken similar measures over the years, and not all for the same reasons. Egypt blocked porn in 2011, and in 2015, India’s ordered ISPs to block 850 sites, most of which were pornographic, but which also swept up others including CollegeHumor.com.

In December, Bangladesh blocked 560 sites. Russia choked off Pornhub and YouPorn in September, and in a bizarre piece of digital finger wagging, its regulator Roskomnadzor advised users to “meet someone in real life”.

Some government attacks on porn seem sporadic, sparked perhaps by specific abuse cases or by political reactions. For example, Pakistan occasionally has a go, most recently a year ago when it shut down 400,000 sites. The Philippine government’s current swathe of blocks seem related to Memorandum Circular No. 01-01-2014, a circular warning ISPS to block sites issued by the NTC three years ago.

In the US, senators have proposed a bill that would block porn on computers sold in certain states, unless users paid a $20 fee.

In 2013, the UK introduced an opt-in approach, forcing millions of users to ask explicitly to be excluded from “family-friendly” filters. On average, spread across four major service providers, just over one in eight account holders chose to have their traffic filtered, according to a report from Ofcom, the telecoms regulator.

In October, Israel approved a bill with similar aims.

The UK government has said it is worried about children viewing online porn, and has now delivered on a further promise to block porn sites via the British Board of Film Classification based on age. The government Amended its Digital Economy Bill in November with the new rules, which would let the BBFC tell ISPs to block access to porn sites that don’t verify a user’s age properly.

That isn’t the whole story, though. Anti-censorship supporters are worried about a provision in the UK bill that enables the BBFC to block altogether porn that it considers “nonconventional”. What might nonconventional porn encompass? The BBFC, which generally follows the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, already banned a bunch of acts from video on demand (VoD) porn, and there’s a list here.

The problem with porn blocking

Books have been written on the morality of porn, and on governmental roles surrounding it, neither of which we’ll address here. There’s a more immediate question to unpick: can these blocks be effective in the first place?

Few people would support children seeing porn, but verifying viewers’ age online is a tricky problem. Suggestions have included asking for a credit card or cross-checking against the electoral register, both of which could create opportunities for fraud, and could discourage adult viewers who don’t want to be identified as they surf free porn online.

Blocking porn sites altogether is a similarly tricky task. Keeping track of the internet’s constantly evolving list of porn sites would be difficult, and keyword-based searches are inaccurate, which is why Canada’s popular history magazine is no longer called The Beaver.

So what’s left? Human intervention? Potentially damaging. Machine learning? Arguably not ready for prime time. Facebook, which has used a mixture of AI and human operators, often gets things wrong.

Censors also face another problem: VPNs and anonymous surfing networks, which internet users can easily use to get around local content walls. And it seems they do.

In this safe-for-work blog post, popular porn site XHamster highlights Thailand, Turkey, UAE, China, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and Iran as countries that blocked its sites. Thailand provided more than 125m visits to the site in 2016, and the lowest number of visits, from Iran, still totalled more than 8m. Russian visits dropped by two thirds after the country initially banned visits to XHamster in 2015, but Russians still peeked at its pages more than 73m times last year.

The other issue for those governments specifically targeting child abuse images relates to dark web material. The Internet Watch Foundation’s 2015 report highlights a large amount of child abuse content on the open internet, but it also shows a marked increase in the use of hidden dark web services to host child abuse images. It found 79 new hidden services offering this category of content in 2015, up 55% on 2014. Blocking sites on the open web won’t help solve that problem.

Governments who really understood the problem would have to block proxy services and networks like Tor, which is difficult to do, and disastrous for privacy and free speech, because while many people may use them for illegitimate reasons, others rely on anonymous networks for legitimate communication – including some of the internet’s most vulnerable.

Governments have different motives for censoring online adult material, some of which overlap. Whatever their motives, they’re all fighting an uphill battle, in terms of crafting nuanced, sensible policy and then finding technology that can support it. It’s not a job many would want. It may not even be a job that’s feasible.