Appendix: About Age Verification Data

Data around age-verification can be complex, as there has been limited study and even more limited real-world application of the proposed protocols. The data in FSC’s infographic is our attempt to draw attention to as much real-world data as possible, but it can be difficult to explain some of the complexity in a graphic.

Below are some of the details on that data, including where it came from, context that might be important, variables that could affect it, and other resources where one can dive deeper. This is not an easy issue and we’re happy to talk through any of it — including solutions that might be more effective. We don’t want minors on adult sites, either.

About “Compliant”

Throughout the infographic, we use the word “compliant” as shorthand to talk about platforms that are performing some form of age-verification or otherwise limiting access in those states, in an attempt to comply with these laws. However, the language in these laws varies from state to state, and is often vague and confusing. It’s unclear to us, and to many platforms, what systems or protocols count as compliance.


1. Compliance Percentages

Multiple studies have shown that the vast majority of visitors leave adult sites when they are asked to age-verify using methods required by law, such as ID upload. In a presentation of research to the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, researcher Olivier Blazy of the Ecole Polytechnique found that just 1.7% of visitors were willing to complete age-verification using methods such as those (Blazy 2024).

These numbers echo the experiences of individual platforms. JustFor.Fans initially attempted to comply with AV law, but found that just 3 in 4 visitors left the platform without even attempting to age-verify. Of those who remained, just 9% were willing to complete the process: a total verification rate of 2.25% (Kelly 2023).

Another leading adult platform, xHamster, reports that a mere 6% of visitors even attempt age verification and only half of them succeed (Germain 2024). French platform Tukif related that since employing age-verification on their website, "less than five percent of users arriving at the verification system come out verified on the other side." (AFP 2025) Other platforms have reported similar numbers.

Some solutions do slightly better. Using a credit card, facial age-estimation or use of a mobile ID in a jurisdiction where it's commonly used for non-adult purposes can encourage greater compliance, but the overall numbers are still dismal, with less than 20% of consumers willing to comply (Blazy 2024).

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2. Fears and Concerns Over Verification

One of the concerns with age-verification protocols is that too few studies have been done on consumer attitudes showing the real-world effects. While different verification and systems and cultures may have different outcomes, the majority of consumers express deep concerns over age-verification. In a study conducted by Ofcom, the regulatory party charged with enforcing age-verification in the UK, researchers found that:

  • 61% of adult content consumers say they do not comply with age-verification because they do not believe their information will be safe.
  • 76% of adult consumers who do not age-verify said they do not want to share their personal information online in relation to adult content.
  • 37% of those who refuse to age-verify say it's at least partly due to the hassle.
  • 51% of those who refuse to age-verify say they can find the same content elsewhere without having to verify (Ofcom 2024).

French platform Tukif related that since employing a "double anonymous" age-verification on their website, "less than five percent of users arriving at the verification system come out verified on the other side." Despite the use of a privacy-preserving solution, "It's killed traffic to our site." (AFP 2025)

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3. Difficulty of Compliance

A reporter at VICE went through the verification process of the most popular age assurance vendor and found that:

“As a first-time user of Yoti, we did not have a seamless experience and identified 52 simple steps between deciding to use this method and being able to access porn. People who have used Yoti before or who don’t have various timeouts or document-scanning errors are likely to have significantly fewer steps.... Due to ‘higher demand than usual,’ the app said, this would take longer than usual. How long is ‘usual,’ the app did not say, but ultimately processing took about five minutes. Once it finished, we had to go back to the xHamster site to scan the QR code again because the original one had timed out.”

Source: Cole, Samantha. 2023. "Accessing Porn in Utah Is Now a Complicated Process That Requires a Picture of Your Face." VICE, May 3, 2023. https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3mnqx/utah-age-verification-pornhub-xhamster-laws.


4. Increased VPN Interest

There is ample documentation of the increase in interest in Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) in the wake of age verification laws taking effect in US States. These tools allow a user to appear to a website to be in a different city, state or country than they actually are. For example, someone in Texas could use a VPN to make it appear, to a website, that they are in Romania — thus avoiding age-verification protocols targeted at Texans.

Because of the nature of VPNs and the decentralization of the internet more generally, it’s hard to find clear indicators that would demonstrate the specific percentage of consumers who switch to VPNs to avoid age-verification protocols in “State X,” but the surge in interest and adoption is fairly clear.

  • After Utah’s age verification law went into effect and Pornhub suspended access, several VPN providers reported major spikes in traffic or downloads. Surfshark said its downloads in Utah roughly doubled, Private Internet Access saw website visits from Utah more than double in a single day, and ExpressVPN experienced a 300% increase in Utah traffic (Lima-Strong and DiMolfetta 2023).
  • VPN usage in Utah surged following Pornhub’s shutdown in response to new age verification laws. Demand began rising the day before the law took effect, increasing 142% on May 1 and then jumping by 847% on May 2 compared to the previous month’s average (Top10VPN 2024).
  • In Louisiana, VPN demand rose by 210% on December 31 compared to the monthly average, coinciding with the implementation of new age verification laws for adult websites starting January 1 (Top10VPN 2024).
  • New age verification laws in Montana and North Carolina, which took effect on January 1, triggered a sharp rise in VPN demand. In Montana, usage peaked at 482% above the usual average, while North Carolina saw a 266% increase, both around December 28–29 (Top10VPN 2024).
  • Following a court decision allowing Texas’s age verification law to take effect, VPN demand in the state jumped 275% on March 15 compared to the previous monthly average (Top10VPN 2024).
  • After Pornhub suspended access in Texas due to the state’s age verification law, Google searches for VPN services spiked, suggesting that residents were seeking ways to bypass the new restrictions (Fung 2024).
  • When Pornhub was blocked in Idaho at the end of June, VPN demand rose sharply. NordVPN reported a 46% month-over-month spike in user demand and a 20% increase in website traffic, with Google Trends also showing a major uptick in VPN searches during that period (Komatsoulis 2024).
  • Reports indicate that in states where online pornography restrictions went into effect, VPN usage rose sharply. Top10VPN found a 275% increase in demand in Texas on the day Pornhub cut access, while similar spikes occurred in Louisiana. ExpressVPN reported higher traffic when age verification laws were enacted across seven out of eight states it tracked (DeGeurin 2024).
  • VPN usage surged dramatically in several states following the introduction of age verification laws, with demand increasing by 1,150% in Florida, 1,060% in Oklahoma, 967% in Utah, and 542% in Alabama, suggesting widespread circumvention of site blocks through out-of-state IP addresses (vpnMentor Research Team 2025).

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5. VPN Usage

In 2023, research found that 41% of youth aged 11-14 years use VPNs (Santer et al. 2023).

Another study of 16‐ and 17‐year‐olds in the United Kingdom found that 45.7% had used a VPN or Tor browser and 22.9% knew what they were (Thurman and Obster 2021).

In 2023, virtual private network (VPN) usage stood at approximately 42 percent in the United States among adults and grew to 46% in 2024 (Cruz 2024; Security.org 2024).

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6. Texas Google Searches

In May 2024, using a VPN to access adult sites via a Texas-based server, Free Speech Coalition searched for common adult searches, including “MILF porn,” “big boobs porn,” and “gay porn.” Of the top twenty search results returned, in each case, just one link required age-verification. Other links either didn’t age-verify, were social media sites theoretically exempted from the law, or had blocked the state entirely.

Source: Internal data compiled by Free Speech Coalition using a VPN to access a server in Houston, June 2024


7. Case Study: North Carolina

In states that have passed age-verification laws, traffic has dropped dramatically on legal, compliant adult sites, and, in the same period, risen on non-compliant sites located outside of the country. While this trend is observable in numerous states, North Carolina provides a fairly typical example.

North Carolina’s age-verification law went into effect on January 1, 2024. Using data collected by SimilarWeb Pro, the benchmark traffic intelligence service, we can see the stark difference in traffic between December 2023 and three months later, in March 2024. Traffic in the state drops on a basket of sites that are compliant, and rises dramatically on a basket of sites that are not. Illegal and pirate sites are the unlikely beneficiaries of the laws.

Unfortunately, these graphs can not measure the true impact, since while large compliant sites are relatively easy to identify, the number of non-compliant pirate and foreign sites is too large to accurately represent.

Source: Traffic data accessed via Similarweb Pro.


8. Adult Content on Social Media

A survey of 16‐ and 17‐year‐olds in the United Kingdom showed that more (63%) had seen pornography on social media platforms (Thurman and Obster 2021).

An Australian regulator’s research shows this includes both intentional and unintentional access, occurring across pornography sites (70%), social media feeds (35%), ads on social media (28%), social media messages (22%), group chats (17%), and social media private group/pages (17%) (eSafety Commissioner 2023b). Teens said they commonly find pornography on social media (60%) including Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and TikTok (eSafety Commissioner 2023a).

A recent survey commissioned by the Children’s Commissioner in England found 41% of participants who had seen online pornography had viewed it on Twitter, a social media service which allows pornography but requires it to be tagged as sensitive and hidden from under 18 accounts (though does not age-verify users). This was more than dedicated pornography sites (37%) and other social media sites (Instagram 33%, TikTok 23%, Reddit 17%) (U.K. Children’s Commissioner 2023).

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) found it was also very common for respondents to have seen pornography through social media. The most common platforms were Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter. Of minors who had intentionally sought out explicit content, 44% said they had done so on social media (Revealing Reality 2020).

Common Sense Media’s Teens and Pornography report found that 38% of teens who’d sought out pornography found it on social media, with younger teens between 13 and 14 more likely (49%) than older teens (32%) (Robb and Mann 2023).

Lawmakers were purposeful in the decision to carve social media platforms out of the law’s application. A leading sponsor of one of West Virginia’s bills told reporters that the law only applies to sites where at least 33% of the content is harmful to minors is meant to "act as a buffer" for social media websites that host adult content, but pornography is not the "intent of the website." "That protects us from having to go after, you know, requiring social media companies to require the same type of verification that you would of Pornhub or something like that," he said (Willingham 2024).

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9. Messaging Apps

Discord, Telegram, and Whatsapp are messaging apps that support public multi-user channels similar to the chat rooms of the 1990’s. Discord has been identified as a particularly concerning platform for minors' exposure to pornographic content and a recent investigation found "scores of YouTube channels" that used Telegram to distribute pornographic content, including channels with "over 650 members" sharing adult videos (Bark 2023; Sharma and Tiwari 2024).

A 2023 survey of 9-17 year-old children in the United States revealed that messaging apps are extremely popular with children and that children experience online sexual interactions on all of them:

App Have Used Use Daily Sexual interactions by all minors Sexual interactions by daily users
Discord 48% 23% 7% 14%
Telegram 20% 9% 4% 22%
Whatsapp 43% 19% 8% 18%
(Thorn 2024)

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10. Search Engines

According to research by the British Board of Film Classification in 2020, minors who sought out pornography were more likely to look for it using “image or video search engine[s]” (53%) than dedicated pornography websites (43%) (Revealing Reality 2020). A 2021 survey of 16‐ and 17‐year‐olds in the United Kingdom showed that more (51%) had seen pornography on search engines (Thurman and Obster 2021).

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11. Four Million Porn Sites

Source: Ahmed, Faraz, Muhammad Usama, Muhammad Ali Imran, and Qammer H. Abbasi. 2016. “The Internet Is For Porn: Measurement and Analysis of Online Adult Traffic.” 2016 IEEE 36th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. Michigan State University. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7536508.


12. Better Solutions

In 2016, Pew reported that 39% of parents said they used parental controls or other technological tools to block, filter or monitor their teen’s online activities (Anderson 2016). But in 2023, Internet Matters found that while 37% of parents are aware of parental control software, only 15% actually use it (Wood 2023).

A device-based approach to age verification was proposed by Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Anxious Generation, and has support from a diverse group of stakeholders that includes Meta, Pinterest, USC’s Ravi Iyer, Minnesota’s Attorney General, the Heritage Foundation, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, and the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.

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Further Reading