Consequences of the EU Digital Services Act regulation on Sex Workers and Fans
In July 2025, the DSA (Digital Services Act) guidelines were published imposing mandatory age verification on certain sites and social networks. These laws claim to protect minors, but what are their real consequences?
Cobalt FTM
9/25/20255 min read
The guidelines for implementing the DSA, the Digital Services Act, make age verification mandatory on certain sites, depending on their risk level. This risk level is determined by the platform's audience size, as well as by the nature of its content.
Pornographic platforms are among those for which age verification becomes mandatory due to their content, regardless of their size, but certain large sites (more than 45 million users per month in the EU) hosting different types of content are also subject to this new regulation.
The DSA requires age verification for users based in the EU, through face scan or identity card. Although the DSA was voted on in 2022, it is only now coming into practical application, at the moment when the United Kingdom has also just voted the Online Safety Act (OSA), a law imposing similar verifications on platforms such as adult sites, but also Twitter, Spotify and Wikipedia. France has also voted the SREN law, imposing age verification on adult platforms. Furthermore, since 2023, the United States has voted several age verification laws (AV Laws) requiring sites such as Pornhub to verify the age of their users through identity cards, and this in several states.
These laws are therefore currently emerging everywhere in the Western world, in a context where leaders and pressure groups are concerned about the mental health of minors. Indeed, since lockdown, online life has taken an enormous place in the lives of many people, particularly minors who were deprived of school and activities at a crucial moment in their social development. The digitalization of daily life has accelerated, and in parallel, lockdown, the covid pandemic, and the economic crisis that resulted from it have had dramatic consequences on the mental health of many people. Holding social networks solely responsible for this deterioration in mental health is at best ignorant, at worst dishonest.
Parallel to this digitalization of daily life, many private identity verification companies have emerged, used for certain online banks, as well as age verification for performers on OnlyFans, Pornhub, and other content creation sites. In the United States, the multiplication of site-based age verification laws has favored the birth of many of these identity verification companies, with more or less questionable practices, attracted by this booming market. Their profits come from sites that, obliged to verify the age of their users, pay third-party companies to scan the faces and identity documents of their users; but also from sharing and selling this data.
The legitimate concern of educators and parents for the well-being of minors pushes states to find a solution quickly, and to implement these laws while the way these companies process and share this data is still unknown, but presents a golden opportunity for new companies of this type, who do not hesitate to propose their simple solution to our leaders.
But who can claim to solve a societal problem with a purely technological solution?
The age verification envisaged by legislation is site-based, meaning that users will have to share their biometric and/or identity data on the different sites they use, sometimes several times on each of these sites, with some even requiring verification every hour. This therefore multiplies the risks taken for users' privacy and the security of their data, which they are well aware of and worry about. Site-based age verification will allow governments to build the infrastructure necessary for mass surveillance through the collection of biometric data, which poses a great danger to democracy.
This concern causes a chilling effect, meaning that on one hand, users prefer to abstain from using sites in order not to have to verify their identity, thus giving up certain activities that are nevertheless legal and legitimate. On the other hand, platforms abusively censor certain content by deleting it or defining it as being reserved for adults. In addition to posing a serious danger to users' rights and freedom of expression, these restrictions also endanger online sex workers (SWs) by causing a drastic drop in their audience, and therefore their income. Different studies and tests conducted by platforms have evaluated the number of users refusing to submit to age verification between 85 to 99%, and following the OSA in the United Kingdom, Pornhub and XVideos lost 47% of traffic. These are popular platforms offering free videos. What will happen to platforms for which users pay? As well as small emerging platforms offering more ethical alternatives to OnlyFans?
This means that these laws, although they affect many platforms and content creators, particularly endanger the smallest sites and creators, posing the risk of accentuating inequalities in the porn industry.
Let's start with an optimistic base of a 50% loss of income: an online SW who would make sales of €100,000/month (the top 0.1% on OnlyFans) would therefore end up with an income of €50,000. But most SWs don't earn such amounts! A SW earning €1,000/month (top 10% on OnlyFans, so still a minority), would therefore end up with an income of €500 per month, barely enough to pay themselves €200-300 in salary, depending on their expenses and the taxation of their country of residence. Might as well do another job... if they have the possibility (Spoiler: many SWs don't have other possibilities). And even if they do, why should they have to give up a career that they enjoy and that allows them to flourish?
These laws therefore pave the way for accentuated inequalities: only large platforms and creators who have the means will be able to survive. While the boom of fansite-type platforms (OnlyFans, JustForFans, MYM,...) have precisely allowed many people to create the porn they wanted to see, without a manager or boss to impose practices or rates on them, and therefore to have relative control over their working conditions.
These laws will therefore have the consequence of making the majority of SWs more precarious, particularly the already struggling ones, as well as making them dependent on studios and managers to give them work, even more so as competition has exploded since the OnlyFans boom (+75% of new accounts created in 2020). This will therefore certainly have the consequence of deteriorating working conditions in the porn industry in general, through the decrease in pay for actors and the pressure to have to do this or that practice to be booked by studios.
Furthermore, where will these users go who will no longer go to paid platforms that comply with the law? Perhaps our leaders think they will abstain from watching porn... The reality is that they will go to other sites, unregulated, hosted in foreign countries where it is difficult, even impossible to control them and impose any age verification on them. These sites are well known to SWs who regularly see their videos stolen to be posted there so others can make money off their backs, with few possibilities, even legal ones, for recourse. Same for revenge porn victims, and it will be this content that these people will access, but also minors searching for porn.
I therefore don't see how these laws could help anyone's mental health. Is it too late to really take interest in the psychological difficulties that minors are going through, and to offer them appropriate sex education? To understand why they are searching for adult content, and how to respond to their questions in another way? To fight against misogynistic ideas widely spread in playgrounds, particularly among boys? To teach them to recognize sexual abuse and protect themselves on the internet and elsewhere?
Responding to these issues by imposing age verification is not attacking the roots of the problem; it's trying to bring a technological solution to a problem that is not technological, but a societal problem.
From Protection to Precariousness:
What Are the Consequences of Age Verification Imposed by the DSA?
Sources
https://hackinghustling.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/HackingHustling-Erased.pdf
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c17n9k54qz2o
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-european-union-mini-id-wallet
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/age-verification-is-coming-for-the-whole-internet.html
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/digital-identities-and-future-age-verification-europe
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/just-banning-minors-social-media-not-protecting-them
https://www.pornhub.com/blog/age-verification-in-the-news
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/impact-age-verification-measures-goes-beyond-porn-sites
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