MADRID – Spain’s anti-sex work and anti-porn Socialist Party (PSOE) government led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has unveiled a new age verification app that will become a mandatory step to access adult content from September for everyone in the country.
The Cartera Digital app and its age verification protocols – which are currently non-functional – were announced earlier this week by Spain’s Minister of Digital Transformation and Civil Service José Luis Escrivá Belmonte.
According to Escrivá, Cartera Digital is “currently in development” and in beta phase, Spanish newspaper ABC reported.
Once operational, Cartera Digital will issue ‘anonymous digital access credentials’, allowing any adult with a Spanish national ID who is willing to share his or her information with the government while trying to access sexual content, ‘digital spaces with content can enter. deemed inappropriate for younger users,” ABC reported.
Because the app uses Spain’s national IDs to verify age, it is unclear how the many adult foreigners living, working or visiting Spain could access the content deemed pornographic by the government.
Escrivá described the existence of adult content as “a problem” and noted: “If we don’t all work together, this problem will be impossible to solve.”
By “we,” Escrivá specified that he meant adult platforms and sites that he hopes will be willing to comply with the still-developing Cartera Digital.
Escrivá spent part of his presentation justifying the mandatory app, claiming that it is necessary because “the vast majority of young people between the ages of 18 and 26 believe that this content corresponds to real sexuality.”
Despite the implications of the Minister of Communications, Spaniards between the ages of 18 and 26 are considered adults and thus could still access the content by entering their government ID into Cartera Digital.
Escrivá also cited his belief that Spain is currently suffering from a crisis of sexual violence and blamed adult content for this.
Reactions from the adult industry
Veteran Spanish producer and performer Pablo Ferrari, who also developed local premium fan platforms Loverfans and Darkfans, told XBIZ that Sánchez’s government is “making up rules without knowing what they are judging and ignoring experts or industry stakeholders.”
“It would be reasonable for them to investigate how the adult industry works, and what the known positives or negatives of a measure are, before venturing into something where they don’t know or even fathom the negative consequences it could have,” said Ferrari. said, adding that producers like himself only want paid customers and would be at the forefront of any serious, reasonable effort to limit content to adults.
“The people most affected by the government’s misleading idea will be adults who want to watch adult entertainment,” he added. “Minors will quickly find a way around this, through VPNs and other means. My customers in their 40s and 50s are not as tech-savvy as younger users, so the end result of mandating this intrusive app will be the opposite of what the government claims it wants.”
Escrivá told the press that the Spanish government hopes that international adult sites and major social media and search companies such as Meta, Google and adults.
A socialist-led war on porn
The powerful and influential SWERF faction within the PSOE, backed by Sánchez himself, has repeatedly attempted to recriminalize all sex work and adult content, reinstating the stigmatizing laws of the Franco dictatorship.
As XBIZ reported, this faction suffered a sound defeat in May when a controversial criminalization bill promoted by Sánchez’s government failed to gain parliamentary support among the party’s ruling coalition partners.
The supposedly ‘feminist’ law was loudly opposed by sex workers, sex worker rights groups and the local adult industry. The traditionally left-leaning PSOE relied on ultra-Catholic elements within the main opposition party, the right-leaning People’s Party (PP), to provide some support, but a critical mass of PP parliamentarians withdrew their support for the much-maligned ‘Abolition of the Abolition’. of the prostitution law.
Criticisms from parliamentarians included doubts about the proposed law that does not provide a way out for sex workers, and the emphasis on punishing facilitators and clients, whom the government describes as ‘pimps and underwear’, following the propaganda book of the Nordic Model.
Barcelona-based director and producer Erika Lust warned in 2022 that the PSOE’s call for “the abolition of all forms of profiting from the prostitution of others” posed a direct threat to porn production.
“It does not matter whether the practice is carried out under exploitation – prohibited under current law – or whether it involves independent work, with the consent of all parties involved, according to ethical production standards,” Lust said.
European director, performer and sex work activist Paulita Pappel, who is originally from Spain, told XBIZ that the country is currently seeing a rise in conservative influence.
“This leads to the suppression of votes and erosion of basic human rights,” Pappel noted. “The pretext of protecting children online is used to attack sex workers, limit their resources and subject them to discrimination. Laws requiring age verification and banning online advertising of sexual services put sex workers in precarious situations. We must oppose these measures and advocate for decriminalization. We have to fight back.”
Main image: Spanish Minister of Digital Transformation and Civil Service José Luis Escrivá Belmonte