England’s Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, has urged ministers to require age verification on virtual private networks, saying the tools are now a major loophole in the Online Safety Act. VPNs, which disguise a user’s location, became the most-downloaded category on Apple’s UK App Store last month after adult sites such as Pornhub and Reddit began demanding proof of age from visitors. In a new report, de Souza found the share of young people who had encountered pornography online has risen over the past two years, with some respondents saying they first saw explicit material at age six. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed recalled pornography involving strangulation and 44% reported seeing depictions of rape while still minors. The commissioner said the findings show that “platform design, algorithms and recommendation systems” are driving harmful content to children who did not seek it out. A spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said the government has no plans to outlaw VPNs, which it described as legitimate tools for adults, but warned that platforms deliberately steering children toward workarounds could face “tough enforcement and heavy fines” under the Online Safety Act’s new powers. Separate research by the Molly Rose Foundation, set up after the 2017 death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, claims Instagram and TikTok continue to recommend suicide, self-harm and depression content to teen accounts on an “industrial scale”. The study found 97% of Instagram Reels and 96% of TikTok videos suggested to a fictitious 15-year-old user were harmful. The findings have renewed pressure on Ofcom, which is drafting the Act’s child-safety codes, to impose stricter rules on algorithmic recommendations.