Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, has partnered with UK charity Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), as it backs new standards of good practice for combatting child abuse on pornography sites.

The IWF hopes that Pornhub’s backing of the standards will encourage other online pornography purveyors to join suit.

The IWF is challenging pornography sites to screen people by age, but this can simply be done by asking users to declare that they are over 18.

However, the standards do say that sites must obey UK law, and the Online Safety Act is set to require more stringent age verification for adult entertainment sites, such as using biometric AI face-scanning techniques that can estimate age.

Aylo previously stated that these more robust checks will simply drive users to darker and more illegal corners of the internet, and even took different US states to court over similar age check laws.

Now, the company says it will comply with the UK law.

“We will always comply with the law, and the Online Safety Act is no different, but it is clear from other jurisdictions that site-level age verification does not prevent children from accessing adult content online while creating data privacy issues and increasing exposure to unmoderated, harmful material”, it said.

Rather than age checks across sites, Aylo is pushing for mandated parental controls on devices to mitigate underage access to adult sites.

Besides checking user age, the IWF’s standards have protection for the people adult sites feature as well.

Pornography websites must check the age of those appearing in content using AI tools before it is published, and ensure that all participants have consented to appear in the content shown.

Further, sites must compare content with material that has been digitally fingerprinted as child abuse imagery before it is uploaded to a site.

People who published and appear in material on the adult sites must also be confirmed to be over 18 years old.

“These are pragmatic and necessary steps,” Baroness Gabrielle Bertin, who was appointed to lead a review on pornography by the UK government said. “There is potential to make a huge impact for children’s online safety here.”

Pornhub and many of the adult entertainment companies operating on the platform have faced numerous allegations and lawsuits for not doing enough to protect the people featured across the platform. Many have said that the company did not do enough to stop the spread of non-consensual content, like revenge porn.

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However, the IWF has said that since the parent company changed ownership in 2023 and rebranded from Mindgeek to Aylo, it is improved. Aylo’s annual ‘actionable reports’ of child sexual abuse material fell to zero, according to IWF, likely due to the company expanding its moderation team and implementing more safeguards.

Still, advocates are not ready to congratulate the biggest website for adult entertainment in the world.

“What I don’t want to happen is this to be used as some sort of marketing tactic, or some sort of paper pushing exercise, or a way for companies to say, on the surface, ‘look we’re doing something’, but actually, the substance of it is not there,” Elena Michael, co-founder of advocacy group Notyourporn told the BBC.