NEW YORK—Researchers affiliated with the New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics and other universities are currently developing a working paper about the effectiveness of age verification laws and how they impact user behaviors related to accessing adult entertainment platforms or social media networks.
Mashable reports that these researchers have essentially reached conclusions that the adult entertainment industry advocates and First Amendment proponents have long stated: age verification laws simply don't work and are intended for different purposes like censorship.
"Given how quickly this regulatory space is moving, we wanted to be able to contribute to it when it was most meaningful, not on the timeline of journal publication," said Zeve Sanderson, the executive director of the NYU center, in an interview with Mashable editor Anna Iovine.
Sanderson is referring to the pending outcome of the U.S. Supreme Court case Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton. Sanderson said this "first large-scale empirical analysis of these laws suggests that they're likely not reaching their stated goals ... and if anything could be incentivizing riskier behavior."
Note that this study is in pre-print, meaning that it has yet to be accepted by an academic journal and subsequently peer-reviewed. However, the researchers found through analyzing Google Trends that search traffic to Pornhub saw a 46.6 percent traffic reduction. Pornhub has geo-blocked most U.S. states with age verification laws.
Traffic to non-compliant websites has climbed. For example, the researchers noted a 48.1 percent rise in XVideos searches and a 23.6 percent increase in VPN searches.
The working paper is now available at the Open Science Foundation.
