Shield Our Children Online Alliance (SOCOA) has released its January 2026 United Kingdom report, setting out concerns that recent developments have exposed weaknesses in the UK’s current age-assurance model for online pornography.
Titled Shield Our Children Online Alliance (SOCOA) — United Kingdom Monthly Report: January 2026, the report examines four areas: VPN circumvention, platform non-compliance, continuing childhood exposure, and enforcement delays. SOCOA says these developments raise questions about whether a platform-led approach can deliver consistent protection in practice.
One of the report’s central findings concerns Aylo’s January 2026 announcement that Pornhub, YouPorn, and Redtube would block all new UK users from 2 February 2026. SOCOA believes the move should be treated as a significant signal for policymakers assessing how the present system is functioning.
“January brought several developments that made the limitations of the current model harder to overlook,” said Graham Hellier MBE, Founder of SOCOA. “When major platforms respond in one way, but non-compliant or less regulated sites remain accessible elsewhere, it raises a serious question about whether the system is delivering the level of protection intended.”
The report also identifies VPN use as a continuing loophole in the current framework. SOCOA insists that when age checks are applied at the platform level, users can still bypass them by masking their location and accessing services as though they were outside the UK.
“Any safeguarding framework that can be sidestepped easily will struggle to provide consistent protection,” Hellier said. “That is why circumvention cannot be treated as a secondary issue.”
SOCOA’s analysis further argues that enforcement remains difficult where websites are operated through overseas entities or opaque ownership structures. According to the report, this can slow regulatory action and leave gaps between the introduction of legal duties and meaningful enforcement outcomes.
The organisation also vents concerns around childhood exposure remain significant, particularly where children encounter pornographic material accidentally or through wider online platforms rather than dedicated adult websites alone.
Based on its January findings, SOCOA is calling for age verification to be shifted from pornography platforms to licensed internet service providers and mobile network operators, supported by anonymous tokenised age verification and measures to address VPN-enabled circumvention. The organisation says this model would be more enforceable while also reducing privacy risks for adults.
“We believe child protection online must be both effective and privacy-respecting,” Hellier said. “That means placing responsibility with regulated access providers operating under clear legal oversight, rather than relying on the regulated industry to carry the burden alone.”
SOCOA said its January 2026 report is intended to contribute to ongoing discussion about how age-assurance laws should function in practice where child safety, enforceability, and user privacy intersect.
