Holding the online porn industry responsible for its complacency regarding non-consensual sex
Sometime in the past six or so years, the world’s largest porn site decided it needed a new image. In September 2014, Pornhub announced that for every one hundred videos watched, it would plant a tree. The internet responded with a mixture of bewilderment and sincere respect. For many, it seemed truly surreal that a representative of sleaze and exploitation would do something so laudable. This was one of many charitable initiatives which Pornhub has used over the years as part of its “Pornhub Cares” campaign, indicative of an increasing effort to lend an air of legitimacy to itself. These initiatives have ranged from raising money for the bees, whales, and pandas to fighting single-use plastics, sexual health initiatives, creating a fashion-line to combat domestic violence, and awarding scholarships, including one for women in tech. They were even offering to plow snow for small businesses in Boston, Massachusetts after a blizzard in March 2017 hit the state hard. Pornhub is investing thousands of dollars each year to try to convince you that, unlikely as it may seem, they are trying to do a little good in this world.
The ways that pornography is accessed and produced have changed dramatically in the past thirty years. Online porn first arrived en masse in the early 90s. These early sites overwhelmingly required paid subscriptions and featured professionally produced videos. Launched in 2007, Pornhub disrupted this model by making millions of pornographic videos available for free and by allowing anyone to upload their own content to their site. With the ability to freely upload videos, there has been a complete lack of oversight, which has allowed Pornhub and similar sites to directly profit off non-consensual content, including child pornography.
While sites like Pornhub have formally banned users from uploading non-consensual content like revenge porn, these videos remain pervasive through the platform, and there is next-to-no enforcement on the part of the site. The process for removing non-consensual videos from sites like Pornhub places the onus entirely on the victims. After initially being removed, Pornhub users often re-upload the same non-consensual videos continuously, despite the efforts of victims to have them removed. In many cases, Pornhub users have included the identities of victims after re-uploading non-consensual videos, encouraging harassment by listing their contact information, social media profiles, and those of their family members. It is especially disturbing that the victims are often children. In several cases, the families of underage victims have gone public, describing how the same sexually explicit content has been continually uploaded and re-uploaded to Pornhub, despite their continual efforts to have these videos and photos removed.
Through websites like Chatroulette and Omegle, anyone with a webcam can anonymously video-chat with strangers around the world. There are thousands of videos on Pornhub of sexuality explicit video-chats on these two sites (the search keyword “omegle” brings up nearly 10,000 results), the vast majority of which were uploaded without the consent of one of the participants. There is no way of verifying a user’s age before they visit these sites, and many of the victims who appear in these videos are underage. While Pornhub has taken the step of banning search terms related to non-consensual content like revenge porn, they have done nothing to prevent the upload or access to screen-captured videos from these chat sites. There are thousands of more videos on Pornhub described as “creepshots” and “upskirts” where victims are stalked and filmed without consent in public, in some cases users planting cameras in dressing rooms. These videos are just as easily accessible and prolific on the platform, and there is no way to verify the ages of the thousands of individuals involved.
If sites like Pornhub want to normalize themselves, they are going to have to enact far stricter policies to ensure that they are not complicit in sexual exploitation, particularly that of children. With millions of videos uploaded to the site and millions of visitors on a daily basis, how can they possibly actualize their ostensible bans on non-consensual and underage content? The only viable solutions are to either prohibit users from uploading, or for every video to be intensely scrutinized. In the US, professional porn crews have to file paperwork on a state level ensuring that everyone appearing in their production has reached the legal age to do so. Similar policies need to be enacted on a far wider scale through Pornhub and other porn streaming sites to prevent the ongoing exploitation and re-victimization of countless people. Up until now, there has been a kind of de facto “honour system” in place in which Pornhub assumes that the videos users are uploading to the site are legal, only investigating content after a victim discovers it and comes forward. This existing policy has been disastrous and completely ineffectual, allowing abusive content to remain pervasive throughout the platform.
It’s important to note that Pornhub is owned by Mindgeek, a Canadian company which runs a monopoly on internet porn and owns popular streaming sites like Redtube, Youporn, and producers like Brazzers and Digital Playground. In 2019, there were over 42 billion visits to Pornhub, and 115 million visits per day. In the same year, there were over 6,800,000 new videos uploaded, accounting for more than 1,360,000 hours (or 169 years of new content. While Pornhub makes some of its money through paid premium memberships, a far greater amount of revenue is generated through ad traffic. This has fundamentally altered the business model of the porn industry, with the assumption from viewers that videos will be available for free. Every view a video gets generates revenue for Pornhub and given the sheer number and popularity of non-consensual content on the site, the lack of effective enforcement or oversight is no coincidence. Increasingly mainstream brands are paying to advertise on Pornhub, ensuring their complicity in some of the most horrifying forms of abuse imaginable. If sites like Pornhub want to establish their cultural legitimacy, they need to work far harder to protect the people whose exploitation they are enabling for profit’s sake.
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