Other Girls Do Porn videos remained on the site via unverified uploaders who slipped by Pornhub's faulty moderation. Pornhub only removed Girls Do Porn's official channel after Girls Do Porn's owners were charged with federal sex trafficking counts. Pornhub continued to host Girls Do Porn and even promoted it as a "Pornhub Content Partner" while it was being sued by 22 of the women for fraud, emotional distress damages, and misappropriation of their likeness, and after a Motherboard investigation showed Pornhub was being used to dox and harass the women in the videos. While Pornhub's decision to stop unverified users from sharing videos on its site could greatly reduce abuse on its platform, it's not a guaranteed method to stop all abuse. Sex workers say that Exodus Cry's roots in anti-pornography and anti-sex work causes, as well as its current lobbying for Pornhub to be shut down completely, only work to put them more at risk.
Motherboard investigated Traffickinghub in September, and its parent organization, the conservative anti-trafficking group Exodus Cry. These are the same forces that have spent 50 years demonizing Playboy, the National Endowment for the Arts, sex education, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and even the American Library Association. These are organizations dedicated to abolishing pornography, banning material they claim is obscene, and shutting down commercial sex work. "The two groups that have spearheaded the campaign against our company are the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly known as Morality in Media) and Exodus Cry/TraffickingHub. "It is clear that Pornhub is being targeted not because of our policies and how we compare to our peers, but because we are an adult content platform," the announcement stated. Pornhub's announcement also cites a report by third-party Internet Watch Foundation, which found 118 instances of child sexual abuse material on Pornhub in the last three years, and notes that in the same period, Facebook's own transparency report found 84 million instances of child sexual abuse material on the social media platform. Following the credit card companies' decision to dump Pornhub, some sex workers fear not just a blow to their income, but to the adult industry as a whole if payment processors target smaller platforms next. The change to banning unverified users from uploading or downloading, however, was a shift that models on the site have been asking the company to act on for years, both to prevent abuse and stop content piracy. Last year, users uploaded more than 6.83 million new videos to Pornhub, according to the platform's 2019 year in review.Īfter the Mastercard and Visa announcements, porn performers who use the platform as a source of income told Motherboard that the change would seriously damage their livelihoods.
People uploaded pirated full-length movies to Pornhub, as well as memes and jokes.
REAL AMATEUR GAY VIDEOS VERIFICATION
Verification makes users eligible to join the ModelHub program which allows them to monetize their videos.Ī lot of unverified videos on Pornhub aren’t even porn. Pornhub told Motherboard that this process will be more thorough in the new year, but didn’t provide specifics about what that will involve. Verified users, according to the site, are those who have submitted a selfie of themselves holding a piece of paper with their username and (or the Mindgeek site they're signing up for) handwritten on it. That number briefly went back up to 7.2 million, so at the moment it’s unclear how many videos will be removed. On Monday morning as of 9 a.m., that search bar is showing only 4.7 million videos, meaning Pornhub removed most of the videos on its site, including the most-viewed non-verified amateur video, which had more than 29 million views. Before the content purge on Sunday evening, Pornhub hosted around 13.5 million videos according to the number displayed on the site's search bar, a large number of them from unverified accounts.