Less than a week after claiming the site never permits child sexual-abuse porn, Pornhub says it will make significant changes to its uploading and monitoring.
It’s been less than a week since New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a long feature piece about a number of children who were raped or sexually abused and later had videos of that abuse uploaded to Pornhub, a major host of Internet pornography.
Shortly after Kristof’s article appeared and I published a Corner post commenting on his work, I received a statement from Pornhub, which was adamant that, first, essentially no child sexual-abuse pornography appears on its site and, second, that its moderation policies were in no way at fault if such content happens to appear.
The spokesperson called it “irresponsible and flagrantly untrue” that Pornhub ever allows child sexual-abuse material on its site, despite the fact that his statement later went on to admit that an independent review group found at least “118 incidents of CSAM on Pornhub in a three year period.”
He also said that Pornhub employs “a vast team of human moderators dedicated to manually reviewing every single upload” — a rather unbelievable assertion given that Pornhub itself reported an average of 2.8 hours of pornography uploaded to the site per minute last year. We were meant to believe, according to this statement, that Pornhub employs an almost impossibly large staff dedicated to preventing child sexual-abuse porn from appearing on the site, that it is “flagrantly untrue” to suggest such content ever appears on the site, and that if some such videos did appear it was not the fault of Pornhub’s “vast team” of moderators.
Flash forward just a few days, and Pornhub has announced a host of rather significant policy changes. From now on, Pornhub will allow only “properly identified” users to upload pornography to the site and will no longer permit any downloads. The site also said it is making “some key expansions to our moderation process,” partnering with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, and planning to issue its first transparency report next year.
The sudden unveiling of these major changes seems to contradict Pornhub’s assertion last week that it was in no way at fault for any child sexual-abuse pornography available on its site. Though the site claims that these changes were the result of a routine review conducted this past spring, it is hard to believe that the timing of the announcement was coincidental, coming as it did less than a week after a bombshell story brought renewed scrutiny.
After Kristof’s piece, Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) doubled down on his call for the Department of Justice to investigate Pornhub and its parent company. He repeated that demand after these new changes became public. “Just the other day Pornhub was insisting that it didn’t have a problem with rape and assault videos and that its ‘vast team of human moderators’ was magically working around the clock to review the 2.8 hours of video that were uploaded to the site every minute,” Sasse told National Review. “Today, they’re doing a complete 180 by changing their policies. These new changes underscore the need for a full DOJ investigation.”
Also in the wake of the Times story, major credit-card companies had announced that they were investigating their business relationships with Pornhub.
As Kristof put it in a series of tweets after the site announced its new policy, “a great deal depends on how responsibly Pornhub implements these, and it hasn’t earned my trust at all, but these seem significant.” Kristof also pointed out that “continued monitoring and pressure will be necessary, and that we should also widen the lens to look at other companies. XVideos already has a bigger audience than Pornhub, and fewer scruples, and they should be forced to adopt similar measures — and make them work.”
Though this certainly isn’t the first time that Internet pornography companies have faced intense criticism, Pornhub’s choice to release policy changes almost immediately thereafter feels like a significant shift. There is no way to know, of course, whether these measures will actually curb the appearance of child sexual-abuse porn; it seems unlikely. And, more important, it seems even more unlikely that improved moderation and somewhat limited uploading on one pornography website will do anything to resolve the serious entanglements between the porn industry and sex trafficking of women and children.