The United Kingdom has passed a law called the Online Safety Act, which impacts what I can show users who are based in the UK.

You can no longer listen to the audio if you are browsing this site from a UK IP address.

Age verification for adult content

The short version of a very long story is that this legislation, designed to help protect children from porn, requires sites which serve pornography to UK users to verify each user’s age. Not with a tickbox that says ‘are you over 18?’ but something more robust.

The definition of “pornography” is broad and vague. It includes audio content.

The standards for what counts as ‘age verification’ are potentially a huge privacy risk to individuals, and they are also cost-prohibitive to a site like mine. I cannot afford to do it.

You can find out more about the Act, and its impact, over at OnlineSafetyAct.co.uk

What exactly have you done?

I have set a rule within Cloudflare that blocks UK IP addresses from accessing a specific folder, where I store the audio.

So I can still hear the audio if I’m in a different country?

Yes. If your web traffic is coming from any country other than the UK, you should still be able to hear the audio.

But I can still read all your stories?!

Yes. As per the Online Safety Act, text is not in scope but audio is. You are legally allowed to read the stories I write here without verifying your age, and I am legally allowed to show them to you.

You are also free to use a text to speech generator, and listen to them that way.

However the UK government has decided that it would be harmful to children if you were also allowed to hear them as audio recorded by me or one of my amazing gang of contributors.

Isn’t the whole point of the audio to make erotica accessible to blind people?

Yes. Deliberately breaking accessibility features on my website ranks among the most depressing things I have ever done.

Can I just use a [REDACTED] to get round the block?

Yes, you can. I am not allowed to mention any particular tools though. In Ofcom’s guidance, the regulator states that “service providers should not host or permit content on your service that directs or encourages child users to circumvent the age assurance process or the access controls, for example by providing information about, or links to, a [REDACTED].”

Quite a few people have now emailed me to tell me I should just recommend people use a [REDACTED] to get round the  audio block for UK users, and I don’t want to have to keep sending the same robotic reply so I’m adding this section here. If you know of a way to circumvent the block, and you are not a ‘service provider’ of pornography as defined by Ofcom, feel free to share that information on your own channels so everyone gets the benefit of the same information. I can’t share that info here on my site, though, and I think that includes in the comments. I can’t stop you from sharing it elsewhere though, and I certainly wouldn’t expend any effort to do that.

Why don’t you fight this?

I am one person. I make less than minimum wage. It is all I can do to tread water right now. I wish with all my heart that I could meet this moment with the fire it deserves.

But I have to accept I cannot.

The risk I would be taking is a fine which caps out at either 10% of my net profits or £18 million – whichever is greater. It won’t surprise any of you to learn that I do not have £18 million, and I cannot run the risk of losing everything.

I will be keeping an eye on Ofcom’s guidance about the pornography rules in the Online Safety Act. If Ofcom clarifies that an audio recording of someone reading textual content (as opposed, say, to an audio file of people having sex, or someone moaning) is out of scope, or even that they will not consider it an enforcement priority, I will reconsider my position.

I’m super angry about this and I’d like to send a strongly-worded email!

Please please do. Here’s a website that allows you to contact your MP. Please do not contact me about it, unless you’re offering support. I assure you I would very much prefer not to have to decimate a project I have worked on for many years, which made my site more accessible to blind users.

There is a tool you can use to email your MP directly here, making the case that small sites should be exempt from some of the onerous compliance tasks within the Online Safety Act. I strongly suspect that even if exemptions are offered, my site will not count as ‘small’ by number of users. It is definitely ‘small’ financially though, and exempting small sites makes a lot of sense to me so if you’re up for sending that email please do. Here’s some text you can add to it if you’d also like to draw your MP’s attention to the specific problem I’m facing though…

The broad, vague definition of ‘pornography’ in the Online Safety Act has also caused problems for independent, ethical erotic producers – https://www.girlonthenet.com/osa explains how she has had to turn off an accessibility feature – audio – in order to comply. Even though it is legal for sighted users to read the text content of her site, the Online Safety Act says that ‘audio’ is in scope, so it appears the Act prohibits blind users from accessing audio recordings of those very same texts.

I’m a journalist and I would like to cover this, can you comment?

Yes! Please email me hellogirlonthenet [at] gmail [dotcom]. Thank you for spreading the word.

Got any other useful links?

Yes! This fantastic post by the owner of woof.group (a small, non-profit Mastodon instance for an LGBTQ+ leather community) details their attempts to get Ofcom to answer a few very simple questions about whether they are in scope of the Online Safety Act or not. And here is their post explaining why they believe they are out of scope. Both of these are worth reading if you want to get a sense of a) how hard it is for small sites to determine whether or not they are in scope of the act and b) how extremely unhelpful Ofcom’s guidance on this has been so far.