Now Poland Wants ‘Age Verification’ System to Block Porn Sites

In October, a law passed two years ago in the United Kingdom that would have blocked porn sites nationwide for anyone under 18 crashed and burned, with the British government simply giving up on the law after multiple delays caused by privacy concerns and the inability to figure out a feasible way to verify the ages of porn viewers. But the cautionary lessons of the U.K. “age verification” law appear to have been lost on the governments of other countries, who are now determined to go the same route. On Monday of this week, Poland became the latest country to propose a national “age verification” law for porn, citing the supposed harms caused to children by the availability of porn online. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, of the country’s center-right Law and Justice Party, claimed that 60 percent of Polish boys between ages 13 and 16 had been exposed to pornography, leading to “very serious emotional deficiencies and to threats in the future, to mental health threats of today's young people, later adults.” Morawiecki made the remarks to a meeting of the Family Council, a group of parliamentarians, policy experts and leaders of non-governmental organizations whose mission is to “support, initiate and promote actions that will benefit traditional families,”  according to the English-language news site Poland IN. The Family Council is also set up to find ways to increase Poland’s birth rate, which has been in decline since the 1950s. Poland’s birth rate in 2017 was about 9.9 births per 1,000 people. By comparison, the United States birth rate in 2017 was 11.8 per 1,000.  Poland’s announced move to set up an age-verification system for online porn follows similar proposals in Australia, New Zealand and the Republic of Ireland. Israel has also been developing an age-verification system. But that country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanayahu, halted the proposal in 2018, citing concerns that it could lead to widespread internet censorship. Critics of the law in Israel said that the system was not designed as much to keep out underage net surfers but to “shame” adults who want to access online porn, by forcing them to upload their identity documents to a government database. In Poland, Morawiecki did not specify what method might be used to check the ages of Polish people attempting to view online porn. Photo By Kancelaria Sejmu / RafaÅ‚ Zambrzycki / Wikimedia Commons