How Pornhub – one of the world's biggest sites – caused untold damage and pain
Last week, on 11 December, the credit card giants Visa and Mastercard announced that they would no longer allow cardholders to make transactions on Pornhub, the online giant of user-uploaded pornography that is one of the most-visited sites on the internet. The companies’ decision came just days after the New York Times published a lengthly investigation by the opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof on 4 December, which found large numbers of videos on the platform depicting rape, the molestation and abuse of minors, violent sexual abuse of women and other nonconsensual content.
Like other social media sharing platforms, such as YouTube, Pornhub has historically allowed any user to upload any video they want to the
site. But unlike other such platforms, Pornhub also allowed users to download the material and re-upload it elsewhere on the internet. The Times investigation found that the company’ under-prioritized and understaffed content moderation division was often slow to taking illegal content down and ineffectual at preventing it from being re-uploaded, either to Pornhub or to other pages. This combination of factors had made the site into a harbor for rape tapes, child sexual abuse images, revenge porn and spycam videos, and a wellspring from which such content was spread across the internet.
Almost immediately following the publication of the Times report, Pornhub and its parent company, the Montreal-based pornography conglomerate MindGeek, announced changes to the platform. Users would now need to be verified in order to upload videos, making it easier to hold those who upload to the site accountable for the way the videos are obtained and produced. The “download” button was also removed, making it harder for videos of rape and child molestation to be reuploaded or spread.
These changes will hopefully go a ways toward mitigating future harm from the child sexual abuse images and taped assaults that will inevitably still get uploaded to the site. They will make it harder to upload illegal content with impunity, and harder to steal and spread it. But the changes come a bit too late for the women Kristof interviewed for his investigation. They include Serena Fleites, who at 14 sent nude videos to an older boy she had a crush on; he distributed the videos to his friends, and they wound up on Pornhub. She petitioned the company to take the images down, but they would quickly get re-uploaded; one video of her at 14 has more than 400,000 views. The cascading effects of the harassment and trauma that followed led her to leave school and fall into addiction to cope; she is now sober and living in her car.
Another woman, known only as Taylor, was secretly taped by a boyfriend performing a sex act when she was 14; he also sent the video to his friends, and that also wound up on Pornhub. Taylor is now 18. In the intervening four years, she has attempted suicide twice.
A British teenager named Nicole says that she was blackmailed into sending more and more nude content to a boy when she was 15; the videos have been posted and reposted to Pornhub. She’s now 19; she, too, says she has had multiple suicide attempts. Like the other survivors, Nicole is caught in a dark game of whacka-mole with the company. She can report the videos of herself to the content moderation department, and often, they are eventually removed. But then they are re-uploaded again. And again. All the while, Pornhub profits from the hurt and indignity imposed on these women, who were not only abused, but who now have to live with the knowledge that images of that abuse are enjoyed by strangers as entertainment – strangers who often know or suspect that the videos are nonconsensual or depict minors, and who find that to be a significant part of their appeal.
In a parallel but less morally urgent trend, Pornhub’s historic policies surrounding uploads from unverified users and free downloads have also created a strain on consensual porn performers. These women are in a different class, both morally and legally, from the nonconsensual sexual abuse victims whose images reappear on Pornhub again and again. But these workers, too, stand to benefit from Pornhub’s proposed changes: the download and unverified user upload features on Pornhub created a widespread piracy issue that made it difficult for these women to control and monetize their own image. As a performer called Dee Siren told Rolling Stone, the changes will “stop pirated content from being allowed and it will make sure people have to pay to download content from models … We have been pushing to have this happen for over 10 years.”
Neither of these groups’ concerns was unknown to Pornhub: survivors and consensual sex workers alike have advocated for verified-user only uploads and the removal of the download button for years. But until last week, the company was resistant to the change. Since the problems with Pornhub’s platform have been known for years, why was the company so slow to implement the necessary changes? Perhaps because before the Kristof piece was published early this month, those outside the sex worker and survivor communities were disinclined to push them.
Pornography has been a touchy subject for those on the left for years, despite the various labor and gender justice issues that the industry presents. Sex workers do an admirable job of advocating for themselves, but outside their movement, feminist and workers rights advocates have been reluctant to criticize the porn industry. Part of this is because porn embarrasses people; part of it is because many men can be fiercely defensive of pornography, and aggressively hostile to those who criticize it. For their part, feminists often do not want to interrogate the porn industry for fear of being seen as regressive, puritanical, or anti-sex. And more delicately, people of all genders can be sensitive and defensive around the areas of private sexual life that they feel have been subjected to unfair and damaging stigma. The result is that there are a mosaic of worker and gender exploitations in the industry that have gone largely ignored by left wing advocates too timid to confront them.
The rightwing has no such squeamishness, and has monopolized public conversation around the need to regulate and reform the porn industry, spouting theories about trafficking, sexual exploitation and moral degradation with little basis in fact. Lawmakers like the archconservative Josh Hawley have been at the forefront of pushing for investigations of the company; Republicans have been eager to partner with anti-trafficking organizations that depict taped sex and sex trafficking as violations perpetrated by shadowy, faceless strangers, rather than what experts, and Kristof’s investigation, have revealed it to be: a much more intimate violence, inflicted not by strangers but by friends, boyfriends, and family members of the victim – people, usually men, who she trusted not to treat her as cruelly as they did.
In a vacuum of leftwing commentary and advocacy for needed changes to the porn industry that protect survivors and empower workers, it is the right who has filled the void, and they have done so with proposed solutions that are usually misguided, frequently cynical, and almost never beneficial for women’s dignity and prosperity.
The reactions to Kristof’s exposé were so swift and dramatic – Pornhub made changes it had long resisted, and credit card processors suddenly took seriously a problem that had previously been all too willing to look away from. But we should not forget that these changes have been pushed for by survivors for years. Why did Pornhub, Visa and Mastercard agree so quickly to demands made by a respected male pundit in a prestigious magazine, when they dragged their feet for years while survivors made the same demands? Maybe it depends on who is asking.
She can report the videos of herself to the content moderation department, and often, they are eventually removed. But then they are reuploaded again