Age Verification in Germany

A moral campaigner who has been waging a one-man War on Porn in Germany, and who developed an AI tool that scans online content to identify porn images, has now exported that technology for use by a Belgian media censor.

Tobias Schmid, director of the State Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia, announced the tool after supervising its development himself. He named it KIVI, a word play referencing surveillance.

A spokeswoman for the State Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia confirmed to NetzPolitik that there were exploratory talks taking place regarding expanding the use of KIVI across Europe. Last week, it was confirmed that Belgium's Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA) is also automatically searching the Internet, looking for freely accessible pornography, among other things.

KIVI was developed for Schmid by Berlin-based Condat AG and is currently being used by all 14 state media authorities in Germany. In addition to pornography, KIVI is also trained to detect categories like extremism, hate speech, swastikas or the glorification of drugs.

Belgium's CSA is now scanning X.com for adult content, Meineck reported, noting, From September to December 2023, around 5,000 suspicious activity reports were collected. Examiners viewed around a fifth of it, and around 90% of this content was 'clearly' pornographic, and thus should not be accessible without strict age controls.

German authorities have introduced a proposal to block adult websites deemed to have inadequate age verification systems, and also to prohibit financial institutions from providing payment services to those sites.

Germany's Broadcasting Commission of the Federal States released its draft proposal to reform the State Youth Media Treaty (JMStV).

The proposal is now open for consultation until Dec. 7.

The new proposal would allow the media regulator to turn off the money supply to targeted adult sites, explained NetzPolitik reporter Sebastian Meineck, who has been covering German efforts to censor the internet. Meineck told XBIZ that there is a regulation in German media law concerning online gambling, which has a similar structure to the JMStV and includes a similar authorization to prohibit payment transactions in objectionable cases.

The proposal also simplifies the process for the state to order network blocks. The media regulator, Meineck wrote, is already allowed to issue network blocks for porn sites that resist the mandatory age controls. A network block means that Internet providers such as Vodafone, 1&1 or Telekom must prevent customers from accessing a website as usual. In order to achieve such a block, the supervisory authority currently has to carry out time-consuming administrative procedures, some of which are ineffective.

The proposed change would make it easier for the government to more easily target mirror websites that host content similar or identical to sites that have already been ordered blocked, without another complex procedure, as the draft comments clarify.