PornHub is suspending millions of its X-rated videos that were uploaded by unverified users, after accusations that the website was featuring illegal content involving minors and sexual abuse, according to the company’s announcement.
“As part of our policy to ban unverified uploaders, we have now also suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or members of the Model Program,” the organisation said in a statement.
“This means every piece of Pornhub content is from verified uploaders, a requirement that platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute.”
The unprecedented move followed the NYT report this month, claiming that the platform was “infested with rape videos”. The article prompted an investigation from Mastercard and Visa, which resulted in the decision by providers to sever ties with PornHub by halting payments processed from the website.
After a backlash, PornHub announced last week that it would ban unverified users from uploading content to the website, a dramatic change from the platform’s routine that has existed since its launch in 2007.
Before the move, any user could have created an account and uploaded their content to the platform. Now, “only content partners and people within the Model Program” will be able to do this. However, the company said, they expected to introduce a “verification process” in the next year that would potentially endow any user with a right to upload their saucy content upon “successful completion of identification protocol".
On 14 December, Motherboard published a report suggesting that suspended videos from unverified users could be removed completely after the verification process and review that will reportedly take place in 2021.
As on Tuesday, the website’s search bar showed that PornHub now hosted fewer than 3 million videos – a significant drop from the 13.5 million clips that featured on the platform before the change, according to Motherboard estimates. If completely removed, this would mean that the website would lose the majority of its strictly adult content.
Campaign Against PornHub
In a statement, the company said it has recently been targeted “not because of our policies and how we compare with our peers, but because we are an adult content platform.”
According to Pornhub, they have been the victim of a particularly damaging campaign by two groups - the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and Exodus Cry/TraffickingHub.
“These are organisations dedicated to abolishing pornography, banning material they claim is obscene, and shutting down commercial sex work,” PornHub said in a statement. “These are the same forces that have spent 50 years demonising Playboy, the National Endowment for the Arts, sex education, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and even the American Library Association. Today, it happens to be Pornhub.”
Since summer, #Traffickinghub campaign launched by Exodus Cry has been powering clips with blunt allegations against the porn giant, accusing it of “complicity” with child rape and trafficking for failing to “reliably” verify the age and consent of people featuring in the videos uploaded on the website.
PornHub kept maintaining that its moderators were doing their best to monitor all the uploaded content.
