With dizzying increases in views, especially during the first lockdown, thanks to the access made free for Premium content, today Pornhub is likely to suffer a setback. Visa and Mastercard suspended payment processing on Pornhub following an article in the New York Times. Millions of videos were deleted in one night, and an unexpected stop to unverified users who will no longer upload or download their content.
It all starts last December 4 with the article written by Nicholas Kristof. The piece is titled The Children of Pornhub and denounces the videos of rape, violence, and non-consensual content (especially child pornography) on Pornhub. Kristof’s aspects are of fundamental importance, especially when comparing the numbers provided by the Internet Watch Foundation. This year, in just three months, Facebook removed 12.4 million images relating to minors’ exploitation (in three years, it reported 84 million). Twitter closed 264,000 accounts for the sexual exploitation of children last year in six months. By contrast, Pornhub only said 118 in nearly three years.
Kristof points out that most of the content uploaded to the site comes from common users, i.e., unverified ones. Pornhub has put in a team of around 200 moderators to check out eligible videos, but the number to review is high. It is often not easy for moderators to distinguish role-play videos from those where they are actually shown as minors. However, even if removed, the content may already have been downloaded and re-shared by other users, creating a vicious circle.
Kristof offers three suggestions at the end of the article: allow only verified users to post videos, prohibit downloads, increase content moderation. And so the Pornhub team started from these to inaugurate a new Commitment to Trust and Safety. Between December 13-14, Pornhub started removing videos on the site that weren’t uploaded by official content partners.
As reported in an article by Samantha Cole, Sunday night, Pornhub was hosting about 13.5 million videos, while Monday morning at 9, the search bar showed only 4.7 million videos. The number is fluctuating and will be until next year. It will also no longer be possible to download content, except for Premium services in the Model Program.
As mentioned earlier, after the article came out, Mastercard and Visa launched an investigation into illegal material on Pornhub. Mastercard’s policy rightly states that the relationship between the parties is terminated when illegal activity is identified. The decision to suspend payments was made by Mastercard last Thursday. Visa, on the other hand, has stated that it will abandon the entire MindGeek network.
