Chicago Booth Review Podcast Can We Stop People Watching Porn?

Episode Transcript

Hal Weitzman: One of the top things people do online is look at pornography. Pornhub is among the world's most popular websites, but not in 25 US states, including Florida, Texas, and Virginia, where it has decided to shut down in response to age verification laws that require visitors to submit a government ID or other form of age authentication. These laws are aimed at stopping underage browsers, but have people in those states really stopped watching porn?

Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman. Today, I'm talking with Chicago Booth's Devin Pope, whose research suggests that when it comes to porn, most people are getting around the age verification laws. Devin Pope, welcome to The Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Devin Pope: Thanks for having me.

Hal Weitzman: This is an interesting episode. We're going to talk about pornography, which is something we don't often talk about on... or ever, really, on The Chicago Booth Review Podcast. But you've been brave, and you and a couple of fellow economists have gone out there and looked at the data on pornography and the use of adult websites. I guess the point of this is there's all sorts of regulations, aren't there, around pornography? I think Pornhub, the biggest website in the world, I believe, cannot be easily accessed in at least half of US states, right? So you wanted to look at whether that actually works. Does regulation actually work?

I mean, there's lots of areas where there's regulation of the internet. Why is pornography an area that was particularly interesting to you? If it's not too obvious to say that.

Devin Pope: Yeah, no, no, no. It's a good question. In general, recently I've been excited about doing some research on things that maybe you would say your grandma cares about. Things like family formation, or having children, or going to church. Things that we have a long history in our country and around the world of caring and thinking about, but maybe have been a little less studied by academics these days. And pornography is something that, in conjunction with other things like social media use and sports gambling, has been in the news as something that maybe a lot of... especially young men, are struggling with. Yeah, I think it's worthy of research.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. The data, just the data on current usage, absolutely fascinating. You put in here that people on average spend... People, just all people, spend on average four and a half minutes a week... This is presumably people who have mobile phones or access to technology, spend four and a half minutes a week on average on adult websites. Men more than 12 and a half minutes and women less than four minutes per week on average. On average, of the three top adult websites, which account for roughly half of all the observed time spent on viewing pornography, people spend one minute a week on Pornhub, about two thirds of a minute on XVideos, and just over half a minute on another one called XNXX.

And so, heavy users spend an average of almost 37 minutes a week on these pornography websites, and those in the lowest spend only about... Well, just a few seconds, really, a week. Fascinating information. How did you gather these data?

Devin Pope: Yeah, so if anything, those numbers are probably underestimates. There's been a lot of survey evidence about how much people watch pornography, and you can often get numbers that are much, much higher than that, even, and that's even with people being willing to self-report. The numbers that we have are coming from a panel of internet users. It's from a company called Comscore. And we have about a half a million people in the US that, at some point, agreed to let Comscore track their usage, all of the places they go online.

You could imagine that's not a representative sample of the US overall. Maybe these are people that are a little bit more open to what they're looking at online. And so it's a little hard to know exactly how that translates to the entire country. But I will note that most of these people, we are tracking their PC usage, not their phone usage. We do have a smaller phone sample. But the evidence suggests that pornography usage on cell phones is much, much higher these days, and so we're probably underestimating, but it's a lot of times.

Hal Weitzman: I see. Okay. So those figures are just for people looking on, what, laptops and PCs?

Devin Pope: 92% of our sample is laptops and PCs.

Hal Weitzman: Interesting. Okay. Well, that would make sense that that would be lower usage on the laptops. Now, as we said at the beginning, there's all sorts of restrictions countries and jurisdictions are trying to put in place. China has all sorts of internet censorship, countries like Australia and others have put in place these social media restrictions, and then we talked about 25 US states have this state-level age verification mandate. Why is it so much harder... I mean, if it's not too obvious, why is it so much harder to regulate digital markets versus other traditional markets that economists study?

Devin Pope: Yeah, I think for a couple of reasons. One is that internet markets often... There are companies that have their headquarters based outside of the United States or in other places and yet are still accessing the US marketplace. A lot of those companies are just not going to be compliant to any rules that we pass because they're not worried about any penalties that can be imposed. I would say there's also things that consumers can do online that's different than in physical marketplaces. For example, you can mask where you're at, so you can use a VPN or other methods to circumvent some of these laws. And so, the online regulation is a different world than physical regulation.

Hal Weitzman: Right. It's just harder, right? I mean, it just makes it tougher to know what people are doing, how to restrict that, how even to measure. Even we talked about the measurement issue is hard.

Devin Pope: For sure.

Hal Weitzman: As you said, you use Comscore. I like the way you put it where you said at some point in the past people have agreed to something. We've probably all done that a million years ago before we really knew what we were doing. We clicked some yes, and now it's still following us. But previous studies about age verification, you looked primarily at things like Google Trends or aggregated traffic metrics. So, why was Comscore better or different, and what did you reveal from Comscore that you wouldn't have got from those other metrics?

Devin Pope: Yeah, good. It might be worth me pointing out exactly what these age verification laws are doing, and this will help answer that question. What happened is starting at the beginning of 2023... The first state that did it was Louisiana, but they passed this law that said we don't want kids accessing pornography. And so, in order to go to an adult website... They define an adult website by a website that is mostly pornographic. Obviously, you can get pornography on Twitter or X or on Reddit or other websites, but they're not primarily pornographic, so those websites are excluded.

But for the adult websites, these laws say that if you want to access an adult website, you need to do age verification. They're serious about this. For example, you have to upload a driver's license, or a credit card, and you have to show that you are 18 or older. And so, Louisiana passed that law and these adult websites took a few different approaches. Some adult websites said, "We're not going to comply." And think about these as mostly being websites that are based overseas, and they're just not interested in this law. The largest adult website, Pornhub, shut down. They said, "It's going to be easier for us... No one's going to upload their driver's license. We're just going to shut down." And so, in most states-

Hal Weitzman: Presumably they also don't want to be responsible for verifying that kind of information.

Devin Pope: Yeah, so there's an infrastructure involved there. And so in almost all states, they just decided to shut down. If you access pornography... I'm sorry, if you access Pornhub and you're in Texas right now, the site will say it's unavailable to you. And that's now happened in 25 different states. And so, if you're interested in looking at the impact of those laws, you could use something like Google Trends or other data sources to just look at how many people are going there. What's nice about our data is because we have individual level data, we can look at things like, well, did you stop going to Pornhub, but then you started going to a different website that was not compliant?

Hal Weitzman: Because not everyone has shut down.

Devin Pope: Exactly. Some places just remained open and are being non-compliant with the law. We can also just see-

Hal Weitzman: Oh, I see. So they're open, but they're not verifying anything.

Devin Pope: Exactly.

Hal Weitzman: I see.

Devin Pope: You could imagine that what happens is, yeah, Pornhub usage goes way down, but all of those people just went to a different website. They just substituted away to a website that's not compliant. And if you're not carefully measuring those quantitative effects, you don't know the impact of the law. Google Trends makes it hard to do that, so our individual level data allows us to really get at exactly what is happening when this law goes into effect.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Tell us what the headline is. What did you find?

Devin Pope: If you are in a state that had an age verification law pass, so one of the 25 states in the United States where this passed, what you see happen when that law goes into effect is that total time spent on adult websites in that state goes down by almost 10%. So you see a meaningful reduction in time spent online on these adult websites. But it's interesting to understand, well, why doesn't it go away completely? We literally just passed a law that said you can't go there.

Hal Weitzman: But just to clarify, are there some porn websites that are doing the age verification thing, or is no one doing it?

Devin Pope: There are some that do it a little bit, but I think it's mostly best to think about they either shut down or they just stay open. That's kind of the main split that happens. I think the easiest way to think about it is imagine 100 hours that was being spent on adult websites leading up to the law, and now the law goes into effect. What happened to those 100 hours of time? Well, this is how we're able to classify it. About 50 hours of those 100 hours that were being spent were already being spent on websites that never were compliant, so they just continue. That 50 hours, you just keep watching your pornography on the websites that didn't shut down.

Another 30%, or 30 hours of those 100 hours, were being spent on websites like Pornhub that did shut down, but we continued to see people using those websites using VPNs. 50 hours continued on, another 30 hours continued on using circumvention. They were using these virtual private networks. And then another 10 hours were using something like Pornhub, but then they switched to the non-compliant sites. Like XVideos is a non-compliant site. That's 90 hours just kept going in some way or another, and then about 10 hours of the hundred hours disappeared. People stopped watching.

Hal Weitzman: One of the reasons that it isn't... I mean, overall we can say it's not that effective, right? Is that fair enough?

Devin Pope: I mean-

Hal Weitzman: It's somewhat effective.

Devin Pope: ... reducing 10% of pornography usage.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Maybe we think that's worth doing, but I'm going to understand why the 90% doesn't work. I guess my question is, if people are already using these non-compliant platforms, most of which are based outside the United States, which is why they can continue to operate like that, do you think that just that structure makes it hard for any jurisdiction to do much meaningful restrictions in terms of pornography?

Devin Pope: I think that's right. It suggests the difficulty of regulating things online. It's a bit of a wild west online. It's just very, very hard to do careful regulation. There have been other proposals of how one might do something like this that would not suffer some of the same issues. For example, there have been proposals of doing a device-regulated age verification system. So, when you own a cell phone, the cell phone itself is able to know if you are 18 years old or not. And if you are not 18 years old, it won't allow you to go to certain websites. You wouldn't be able to circumvent that with VPNs, for example, because it's a different style of regulation.

This is not my expertise. I'm not in exactly what are all the possible ways to do this type of regulation, but I think our research points to some of the issues that can come up when you try to regulate through just a location-based regulation system. Yeah, it's maybe not as effective as one would hopefully want.

Hal Weitzman: I mean, that's presumably applicable more generally. I mean, we know that the social media bans or restrictions are in place or under consideration in many, many jurisdictions for teens-

Devin Pope: For sure.

Hal Weitzman: ... and they're presumably able to circumvent them in much the same way.

Devin Pope: Yeah. Now, imposing some frictions can be... I mean, if you're wanting to reduce consumption, there's various reasons to impose a friction like this. Some people will find it difficult to download a VPN and go through that hassle. It can also be a signal sometimes when we pass laws that this is a behavior that we're trying to discourage and that alone can lead people to reduce their consumption a bit. But yeah, in general, a lot of these things are circumventable.

We see this with sports gambling, by the way, as well. Some states, sports gambling is legal. Other states, it's not. If you're in a state where it's not legal, man, there's a lot of ways to get around it and go try to find a place to gamble if you're wanting to do that.

Hal Weitzman: Devin Pope, in the first half, we talked about your fascinating research on pornography and what happens when jurisdictions try to restrict access to pornography and in response, porn websites shut down and then how people are able to find loopholes to watch it anyway. Let's talk about some of those loopholes and what you found. You looked at VPN card transactions, so you're looking at who is actually paying to get these.

First of all, what is a VPN for those of us who are not familiar with it? In my case, haven't used one for many, many years. What is a VPN?

Devin Pope: Yeah, it stands for virtual private network, and so basically it allows you to mask your IP address so that when I go to a website... Normally the website can see that I'm living in Illinois when I access the website. But with a VPN, you can... I don't know. I don't understand exactly how it works, but you can route your information through some other IP address, and so they think you're going to the website from Germany, let's say. And if Germany doesn't have a restriction on going to Pornhub, then it lets you enter.

Hal Weitzman: And you can choose where you're... You could choose Germany, but you could also choose Bulgaria or Nigeria?

Devin Pope: I think a lot of VPNs, you can choose where you want to route through, or in other cases, they just give you... They randomize it.

Hal Weitzman: Why are VPNs not being shut down? Would be my question. It sounds like a dangerous kind of technology.

Devin Pope: Yeah. I mean, it's been used to do a lot of things like access television shows or sports events in other places.

Hal Weitzman: Well, that doesn't sound so dangerous. I mean, it's probably dangerous to the networks.

Devin Pope: I think a lot of people that have a high priority for their privacy online are interested in using a VPN. It doesn't have to just be to access [inaudible 00:16:06]-

Hal Weitzman: Right. I think we have a VPN actually to get into the Booth network when we're at home. I believe there's also a VPN. I never use it, personally, but I think it does exist.

The transactions that pay for these VPNs... I remember, actually, in the old days, you actually got a physical plastic thing which flashed up a number that you then had to type in, but now I assume it's all just online. The transactions that people use to buy VPN access jumped by a third in response to these restrictions, right? The spike in spending, tell us a little bit about that and how you found that out.

Devin Pope: Yeah, so one of the things we found is if you're living in a state that has this adult website restriction come into place, we still saw a lot of people accessing, for example, Pornhub in that state. So the question is, well, why? Really, the only way you can do it is through a VPN, and so we looked at credit card data to see if there was a spike in people who purchased VPNs when an age verification locked them in.

Hal Weitzman: Does that credit card data also come from Comscore, or is that different?

Devin Pope: No, it came from Consumer Edge, which is a different company that provides access to these type of data. And yeah, we indeed saw a spike. You live in Texas, and all of a sudden you can't access Pornhub without a VPN, and a bunch of people go out and give VPNs. They care about their Pornhub that much.

Hal Weitzman: When you said earlier that the browsing time reduced by about 10%, or fell by about 10% in response to the restriction, I mean, I would assume that that means that some people aren't doing it at all and other people are carrying on.

Devin Pope: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: I mean, would that be your guess? It doesn't mean that everybody reduces their consumption by, on average, 10%, does it?

Devin Pope: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Particularly not if they're buying VPNs. They probably want to get their money's worth.

Devin Pope: That's right. Economists often talk about an extensive margin and an intensive margin. The extensive margin in this case would be maybe some people just stop looking at porn completely, and the intensive margin is people that were already looking at porn maybe just reduced their porn consumption some. And we see evidence of both of that.

We see some people that their usage goes to zero. You could imagine someone that was primarily on Pornhub previously and now they just stop. Other people, they were spending, say, 10 minutes a week on adult websites and now they spend five minutes a week. It's a little hard to understand exactly why that is. They're still obviously accessing it to some degree, but now there's this extra friction. It's a little bit difficult. And so we see some effects on all of these people.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Now, I'm just wondering also, there are other ways, there's private search tools, things like DuckDuckGo. As you said earlier, there's other platforms that are not considered to be adult websites like TikTok, Reddit that you can actually find pornography on. Was there an increase in those? Was there a shift in behavior there?

Devin Pope: Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. When I said that these age verification laws reduced total porn consumption by 10%, I should be super careful. It reduced time spent on adult websites by 10%. That's what we're confident of. Where did that 10%... Did it just disappear and people stopped spending so much time with porn? It's a little bit trickier than that, right?

There are certainly other substitutes beyond adult websites. I already mentioned how you can go to X, you can go to Reddit, you can find pornographic material on some of these other sites. We looked at some of these major sites and didn't see a large substitution towards these sites, so it doesn't seem like that's going on. But there's magazines, right? There's offline stuff that you can access, and obviously we're not going to be able to measure all of those things. So, what we do know is that 10-

Hal Weitzman: That would be a fascinating study to see if people went back to the old-fashioned magazines and things here.

Devin Pope: Yeah. Maybe Playboy-

Hal Weitzman: VHS tapes.

Devin Pope: ... [inaudible 00:20:11] bumps.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah.

Devin Pope: Yeah. Yes. So, we know there's a 10% reduction in adult website time spent, but it's a little unclear where all of that goes.

Hal Weitzman: If it's not too obvious, what is the reason that we would want to restrict pornography?

Devin Pope: Yeah, so great question. This is clearly a bit heated and people have different views on this. In fact, I think it's an open question of whether or not broadly we should be restricting pornography. I think where people can start to agree is that we should be restricting pornography for kids. That's the topic that gets large and vast agreement across the political spectrum and across the variety of adults.

I think it's, like you said, a little bit obvious why we wouldn't want small children to start to spend a lot of time on these sites and potentially get addicted to visiting these sites. Not only can it take a lot of their time, but there's a lot of research that suggests it can warp a young brain in a way that's maybe not healthy. It can cause them to have problems with thinking about how men and women should interact and what a normal relationship might look like that can lead to issues later on. I'm not an expert at this research, but there's certainly... I have young kids of my own, and I don't want my 11-year-old on Pornhub, and about 90% of adults say the same thing.

Hal Weitzman: Right. But having said that, we are here at the University of Chicago where let free markets rule, so let people access whatever. We've had professors at the University of Chicago who argue that we should have completely open access to all kinds of drugs, and we should be able to sell our organs if we want to. Is this another kind of market, in your mind, that is like that? I take this point about kids, but if we draw an arbitrary line at 18 or 21 or whatever it is and say, "Okay, this is where it is," is there any point in restricting it beyond that?

Devin Pope: I think you're right that as soon as we start talking about adults... Setting kids aside, I think we can all agree that it makes sense to have some restrictions there. Once we're talking about adults, I think arguments could be made on both sides, and there are many things that we restrict to adults. There are certain things with sex and prostitution that we find illegal. There's certain drugs, selling your organs. And you're right that a lot of these topics are hotly debated. You might find your libertarians or your University of Chicago economists that will go to bat for saying that we should be allowed to sell our organs and things like that, and I think strong cases can be made for that. But you can also make a strong case that there's some value to having some basic regulations in place.

Devin Pope: Can I jump in on one thing? These age verification laws certainly are not meant to necessarily limit access to pornography for adults. The whole point is to limit access to children. Now, are there people that are pushing age verification laws that are hoping it has a broader impact, too? I'm sure that's the case as well. But I'll note that even our research, we are focused on... The people in our sample are adults. We actually have no data on what is the impact on kids. But what we argue is that probably your best bet for how a 16-year-old is accessing adult websites when these laws go into effect is similar to the 20-year-olds in our sample and how they're accessing.

And so, if a 20-year-old is using a lot of VPNs and getting around this and only getting a 10% reduction in their usage, then that's probably about what our kids are doing, too. If anything, they're maybe getting around things a little bit better than the 20-year-olds. And so, I think our results point to what the impact of these laws are doing for kids, even though we're using adult data.

Hal Weitzman: As we said at the beginning, this is an unusual topic for an economist to focus on. What reaction have you had from other economists, UChicago libertarians or otherwise who've heard about this research?

Devin Pope: Yeah, it's a bit mixed, but certainly there have been some colleagues or friends that are asking, "Well, why study porn? What's the big deal here? I mean, what people want to do in the privacy of their own homes or something is up to them." Even with kids, it's like, "Why? Parents can put restrictions on their own kids' phone if they want." But I think that is potentially a little shortsighted. I mean, pornography is a big issue in the country right now, and part of the way to think about that is just in terms of the amount of time spent on these websites. Pornhub is a massive website.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, just in terms of economic activity, it's significant.

Devin Pope: Yeah. Like four or five of the top 20 most visited websites in the world are pornography websites. Imagine the following. Imagine Facebook shut down in 25 states in the US. We'd be talking about that. That would be a big deal. We'd be exploring the impacts of that and thinking about that. That's basically what has happened over the last couple years. I would argue that this has been one of the most aggressive regulation policies online that we've seen against the porn industry forever, maybe.

Hal Weitzman: Presumably Pornhub, which is the world's biggest website, is not happy about regulation, but have they actually been damaged by it, do you think?

Devin Pope: Good. They're not the world's most popular. They're the most popular porn website.

Hal Weitzman: Oh, okay.

Devin Pope: I mean, people still go to YouTube more than... Spend more time on YouTube and other large websites over porn. But it is crazy. If you go look at the minutes spent on this website and others, it's massive. Is Pornhub excited about this and happy about it? Absolutely not. They've experienced a massive drop and a lot of substitution. A lot of their users have gone to competitors' websites, people that are not being compliant with this law, and it's been a big hit on them. Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: They're not based in the United States though either, right?

Devin Pope: I think they're Canada, but they chose to be compliant and are getting dinged for it.

Hal Weitzman: This is fascinating and, as you say, it's a live issue. What are you thinking in terms of next steps for this research?

Devin Pope: Yeah. My co-author, Matt Brown, is super excited about this research, and my other co-author, Emily Davis as well. Matt has a couple of follow-up projects that's specifically looking at the impacts that pornography can have on particularly young men. He has a project in the works that is thinking about whether young men would be willing to sign up for commitment devices or sign up for restrictions on their phone and be actually willing to pay for services like that, and then follow up with them to see the impacts that has on their lives and the lives of their loved ones. To the extent that we think that at least some pornography is an addiction and people are struggling with it, there is interesting ongoing research to understand how big of a deal that is and how you could maybe help people.

Hal Weitzman: Well, Devin, this has been an absolutely fantastic, fascinating conversation. We'd love to have you back another time to talk about more of your research. Thanks for joining us on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Devin Pope: Thank you very much for having me.