Can Spain keep the kids away from porn?

Today, it seems that sexual content is so easily accessible online as to have become almost mainstream. Spain’s government is trying to change that

It’s a bit like those questions you sometimes get on posters at the check-in desk at an airport, often accompanied with helpful little pictures: “Are you carrying a bomb, knife or gun?”

I have no idea how many people with a bomb, knife or gun in their hand luggage ever threw their hands in the air and admitted defeat – but I guess it’ll be close to zero. It’s the same, I’d wager, with an underage kid being asked by a porn site: “Are you over 18?” My guess is very few tap “no” and click off to watch a Disney cartoon instead.

I’m a parent of two teenagers and I worry about how easy it is to access brutal, hardcore material online. In today’s culture it seems that sexual content is so easily accessible online as to have become almost mainstream.

I overheard a group of teenagers a few days ago, for instance, casually chatting about an apparently famous young woman who “broke the world record” by allegedly having sex with over 1,000 men in 12 hours.

They didn’t stop talking just because I, an adult, walked past. They could have been chatting about a basketball game.

But what can be done about it? In Spain at least they’re trying. The government is in the process of setting up the Digital Wallet Beta (Cartera Digital Beta) whereby Spanish porn sites would be required to ensure visitors are adults as a step towards protecting minors.

“The only thing we’re asking adults to do is make a small effort to identify themselves with a system that’s very easy,” the then minister for digital transformation, José Luis Escrivá, told reporters in July 2024.

Similar steps could be introduced across the EU within the European Digital Identity Regulation.

But it’s proving devilishly difficult to actually create technically while also protecting anonymity online.

A lot of pornographic content is shared directly between people on apps such as Telegram and does not necessarily link to a website. Most of the world’s porn websites are also not hosted in Spain and, anyway, many people access the internet via a virtual private network (VPN) making them appear to be in a different country.

After being verified via their DNI (the Spanish identity card), consumers would then receive 30 “porn credits” granting them access to 30 minutes of adult content a month. More committed fans would then be able to request extra credits.

The scheme has been mocked mercilessly online as the “porn passport”, with jokes about what will happen when the credits run out, and memes of the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, dancing. One popular meme involves two friends heading to the police station to “renew their passport”. There’s even a song.

Some commentators online, more seriously, believe it is simply the government trying to interfere with people’s lives by trying to restrict the behaviour of adults, not just minors.

“It’s not a parody, in fact, it is an unnecessary curtailment of freedoms using minors as an excuse,” wrote one. “They want to brand us like cows or dogs to modify our behaviour, and they also want us to pay for it,” added another.

It seems the biggest problem, though, is not necessarily the technical difficulties of creating and enforcing such a scheme. Many adults – perhaps even more so than their children – don’t want to admit they’re consuming this stuff either. And proving one is an adult, by necessity, requires one to share one’s identity… with a porn site?

Even the purveyors of this material are trying to find ways to keep the kids away. One XXX company named “Techpump” based in Asturias has been trialling its own identification system in Barcelona and Madrid since November. Clickers had to input their ID or allow an AI system to access their camera to see their face to digitally assess their age. Traffic dropped by 85%.

“That 85% drop is a business loss because traffic means revenue. If we had to apply this across all of Spain, we’d have to shut down,” Javier Fernández, Techpump’s chief technology officer, told El País. “That 85% of users who leave just end up on sites like (global porn platforms) Xvideo or Pornhub.”

Maybe, just maybe, the saving grace for some of our children might be the brute ugliness and sheer ubiquity of the content itself. I asked my son, and he said: “I don’t want to watch that stuff, it’s disgusting!”