Ofcom Watch

Ofcom will be relieved that the world's most famous porn tube site will be brining its websites to the age/ID verification fold.

For those stupid enough to hand over ID that can used to maintain a log of their porn viewing, the age/ID verification will start by 24th July 2025. Surely it will be safer to continue porn viewing by using a VPN.

Ofcom has announced that several major providers have agrees to bring in robust methods to check users' age/ID for the first time. Ofcom Writes:

By 25 July, all sites and apps that allow pornography --  whether they are dedicated adult sites or social media, search or gaming services -- must use highly effective age checks to ensure children are not normally able to encounter it. Online firms who publish their own pornography are already required to protect children from it, and thousands of sites have already introduced robust age checks in response.

Major porn providers operating in the UK have confirmed to Ofcom that they will introduce effective checks by next month's deadline in order to comply with the new rules. They include PornHub, the most-visited pornographic service in the UK. Other services who are happy to be named at this stage include BoyfriendTV, Cam4, FrolicMe, inxxx, Jerkmate, LiveHDCams, MyDirtyHobby, RedTube, Streamate, Stripchat, Tube8, and YouPorn. This represents a broad range of pornography services accessed in the UK.

Monitoring compliance with these new duties is a priority for Ofcom. If any company fails to comply with its new duties, Ofcom can impose fines and -- in very serious cases --  apply for a court order to prevent the site or app from being available in the UK. As part of our work enforcing the Online Safety Act, we have already launched investigations into four porn providers and won't hesitate to take further action from July. Under 18s exposed to adult content

Robust age checks are a cornerstone of the Online Safety Act and will help protect children from harmful content. Under the Act, age assurance methods -- which include age verification, age estimation or a combination of both -- must be highly effective at correctly determining whether a user is under 18. Highly effective age checks include credit card checks, open banking or facial age estimation.

From 25 July, all social media, search and gaming sites and apps must prevent children in the UK from encountering harmful content including suicide, self-harm and eating-disorder content. Tech firms will have to apply the safety measures set out in our Children's Codes, or take alternative action to meet their duties, to mitigate the risks that their services pose to children.

The riskiest services will have to use highly effective age assurance to identify which users are children. Any provider that operates a recommender system and poses a medium or high risk of harmful content must configure their algorithms to filter out harmful content from children's feeds.

The services named today have indicated that they plan to deploy a type of age assurance solution which Ofcom said could be capable of being highly effective in our guidance. As we noted in our guidance, the way in which these solutions are implemented in practice will be the ultimate test of whether it is compliant with the OSA

Ofcom hasn't said much about other major porn tube sites that are not mentioned in the list. In fact most of the tube sites listed are owned by Aylo.

First Time Video is pay site specialising in first time in porn sets. there are two websites, ftvgirls.com and ftvmilfs.com.

First time video repsonded to the ofcom censorship by taking away an introductory page describing the website content. British users are now met with just a subscription option to join the website as a paying member.

See article from ofcom.org.uk

In June 2025 Ofcom announced an investigation of the website saying:

We have launched an investigation into whether First Time Videos LLC, which provides the pornographic services FTVGirls.com and FTVMilfs.com, has highly effective age assurance in place to protect children from pornography.

We will now gather and analyse evidence to determine whether any contraventions have occurred. If our assessment indicates compliance failures, we will issue provisional notices of contravention to providers, who can then make representations on our findings, before we make our final decisions.

We will provide updates on these investigations as soon as possible.

See article from en.wikipedia.org

4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. The site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from video games and television to literature, cooking, weapons, music, history, technology, anime, physical fitness, politics, and sports, porn, among others. Registration is not available, except for staff, and users typically post anonymously. 4chan receives more than 22 million unique monthly visitors, of whom approximately half are from the United States.

The website achieved a little notoriety in Donald Trump's first presidential term. The wesbite was identified for providing a voice to 'alt-right' (right leaning) Trump supporters who were otherwise silenced by an alliance of liberal internet companies and mainstream media outlets..

In June 2025 Ofcom announced that it was looking into censoring 4chn. Ofcom wrote:

Ofcom has launched investigations into whether seven file-sharing services, 4chan and porn provider First Time Videos have failed to comply with their duties under the UK's Online Safety Act. Duties under the Act

The Online Safety Act has introduced new rules to ensure online services take action to protect their UK users, especially children.

Sites that publish their own pornography must already have highly effective age checks in place to stop children accessing this material. Search and user-to-user services -- where people can see content shared by others, including social media -- should have assessed the risk of their UK users encountering illegal content and activity on their platforms, and must now be taking appropriate steps to protect them from it.

As well as engaging with large platforms about their new duties, our dedicated taskforce has been attempting to engage with a number of smaller sites that may present particular risks to users. Today we have opened investigations into a number of these services.

Specifically, we are investigating whether the providers of these services have failed to:

put appropriate safety measures in place to protect UK users from illegal content and activity; complete -- and keep a record of -- a suitable and sufficient illegal harms risk assessment; and respond to a statutory information request.

4chan hasn't made a statement about Ofcom's censorship. The website is still generally available in the UKbut is partially self censored. Attempting to reach the site via the home page results in a 403 error message (meaning that the user is unauthorised). However jumping into any other page (eg https://boards.4chan.org/news/) works without error.

 

Offsite Comment: Allowing British authorities to demand compliance from virtually any website.

See article from reclaimthenet.org

Ofcom has set its sights on 4chan, a US-hosted imageboard owned by a Japanese national. The site operates under US law and has no physical infrastructure, employees, or legal registration in Britain. Nonetheless, UK regulators have declared it fair game.

Wherever in the world a service is based if it has 'links to the UK', it now has duties to protect UK users, Ofcom insists.

That phrase, links to the UK, is intentionally vague and extraordinarily expensive, allowing British authorities to demand compliance from virtually any website.

This kind of extraterritorial overreach marks a direct threat to the principle of national sovereignty in internet governance. The UK is attempting to dictate the rules of online speech to foreign companies, hosted on foreign servers, and serving users in other countries, all because someone in Britain might visit their site.

According to Ofcom, 4chan failed to respond to its statutory information requests, making it one of nine services now under formal investigation.

What this law actually does is push platforms, especially smaller or independent ones, out of the UK entirely.

Rather than making the internet safer, the law is creating a digital iron curtain around the UK, where only government-approved content and services remain accessible.

Motherless.com is a well known porn tube site that seems to feature a more diverse selection of videos than most with a little more user/amateur content, than is the norm. The website is still operating and continues to allow open access.

Ofcom writes of its actions:

Ofcom has launched two investigations into whether Kick Online Entertainment S.A has failed to comply with its duties under the UK's Online Safety Act. Duties under the Act

Providers of services in scope of the Act are required to assess the risk of people in the UK encountering illegal content on their service, and take appropriate steps to protect them from it.

Providers are also required to respond to all statutory information requests from Ofcom in an accurate, complete and timely way.

On 3 March 2025, we opened an enforcement programme to monitor whether providers are complying with their duties under the Act to carry out an illegal content risk assessment and keep appropriate records of their assessments. As part of this programme, we issued an information request to Kick Online Entertainment S.A, which is responsible for providing the pornography website Motherless.com. We required it to submit the record of its illegal content risk assessment to us so we could consider whether it is compliant with its duties.

Having received no response to our request, we have today launched investigations into whether this provider has failed in its duties to complete and keep a record of  a suitable and sufficient illegal content risk assessment and respond to a statutory information request.

We have received complaints about the potential for illegal content and activity on this site, including child sexual abuse material and extreme pornography. In light of this, we will also be considering whether the provider has put appropriate safety measures in place to protect its UK users from illegal content and activity and may launch an additional investigation into its compliance with this duty if appropriate

We will now gather and analyse evidence to determine whether a contravention has occurred. If our assessment indicates a compliance failure, we will issue a provisional notice of contravention to the provider, who can then make representations on our findings, before we make our final decision.

We will provide regular updates as these investigations progress.

  The US right leaning forum website GAB has blocked internet users located in Britain. UK users can now only see a landing page explaining that UK internet censorship laws are unacceptable to the free speech loving forum. The website explains its actions as follows:

ATTENTION: UK Visitor Detected

The following notice applies specifically to users accessing from the United Kingdom.

Access Restricted by Provider

After receiving yet another demand from the UK's speech police, Ofcom, Gab has made the decision to block the entire United Kingdom from accessing our website.

This latest email from Ofcom ordered us to disclose information about our users and operations. We know where this leads: compelled censorship and British citizens thrown in jail for hate speech. We refuse to comply with this tyranny.

Gab is an American company with zero presence in the UK. Ofcom's demands have no legal force here. To enforce anything in the United States, they'd need to go through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request or letters rogatory. No U.S. court is going to enforce a foreign censorship regime. The First Amendment forbids it.

Ofcom will likely try to make an example of us anyway. That's because the UK's Online Safety Act isn't about protecting children. It's about suppressing dissent.

They're welcome to try. The idea that a British regulator can pressure a U.S. company that's IP-blocking the entire UK is as farcical as it is futile. If anything, it proves our point: censorship doesn't work. It only reveals the truth about the censors.

We proudly join platforms like Bitchute in boycotting the United Kingdom. American companies should follow suit. The power of the UK's parliament ends where the First Amendment begins.

The only way to vote against the tyranny of the UK's present regime is to walk away from it, refuse to comply, and take refuge under the impervious shelter of the First Amendment.

The UK's rulers want their people kept in the dark. Let them see how long the public tolerates it as their Internet vanishes, one website at a time.

 

Update: Ofcom responds

23rd April 2025. See article from ofcom.org.uk

The Online Safety Act introduces new rules for providers of online user-to-user, search and pornography services, to help keep people in the UK safe from content which is illegal in the UK, and to protect children from the most harmful content such as pornography, suicide and self-harm material.

Wherever in the world a service is based, if it has links to the UK, it now has duties to protect UK users. This includes having a significant number of UK users, or that the UK is a target market. These rules will also apply to services that are capable of being used by individuals in the UK and which pose a material risk of significant harm to them.

The Act only requires that services take action to protect users based in the UK -- it does not require them to take action in relation to users based anywhere else in the world.

Ofcom believes its flexible approach to risk assessment and mitigation allows all services to take appropriate and proportionate steps to protect UK users from illegal content. Some services might seek to prevent users in the UK from accessing their sites or parts of their sites, instead of complying with the Act's requirements to protect UK users. That is their choice.

If a service restricts UK users' access, that action would need to be effective in order for the service to fall out of scope of the Act. The key test remains whether the service has links to the UK. This will depend on the specific circumstances (including whether it is still targeting UK users, for example, by promoting ways of evading access restrictions). Ofcom would assess whether a service is in scope on a case-by-case basis and, where the Act applies, would consider the service's compliance with the law and, where necessary, use our investigation and enforcement powers.

We recognise the breadth and complexity of the online safety rules and that there is a diverse range of services in scope.

New regulation can create uncertainty and navigating the requirements can be challenging. Ofcom is committed to working with providers to help them comply with the Online Safety Act and protect their users. We have therefore developed a range of tools and resources to make it easier for them to understand -- and comply with -- their obligations. We also recently published a guide to help small services navigate the Online Safety Act.

US state department officials have challenged Britain's internet censor over the impact on freedom of expression created by new online censorship laws, the Guardian understands.

A group of officials from the state department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) recently met Ofcom in London. It is understood that they raised the issue of the new online safety act and how it risked infringing free speech.

The state department body later said the meeting was part of its initiative to affirm the US commitment to defending freedom of expression, both in Europe and around the world. During the meeting, Ofcom officials claimed the new rules were only in place to deal with explicitly illegal content and material that could be harmful to children.

A state department spokesperson said: As Vice-President Vance has said, we are concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom. It is important that the UK respect and protect freedom of expression.

Details of the meeting emerged after Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, denied that concerns over free speech had featured in tariff negotiations with the US.

In February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, complained of infringements on free speech in the UK. Elon Musk, one of Trump's closest allies, repeatedly claimed that some prison sentences handed down to people who incited the riots on X were a breach of free speech.

Free speech advocates say that the UK censorship law is going to bring about a culture of 'if in doubt, cut it out' as platforms seek to avoid being subject to Ofcom's enforcement powers.