Pornhub scandal

In the Pornhub scandal, Netflix tried to act as an arbitrator by releasing the Money Shot: The Pornhub story, a documentary about the troubled adult Internet content market.

“Remember the first porn video you saw?” This is the first question asked in the film, which recently aired on Netflix and focuses on the heated debate that has erupted around the porn giant. The “military action” that has recently been covered by the world’s major media is developing between famous porn stars in hardcore tweets. At the same time, everything falls into a heap: a fabulous income, millions of subscriptions and thousands of videos of problematic content, available for free with one click on the Internet.

But let’s start with the basics. Pornhub is much more influential than one might imagine, writes the Greek edition of lifo.gr. Most people think of pornography as a very “private matter”, something that is not usually shared publicly and “can be viewed (enjoy) without leaving your room, without making direct contact with anyone.”

Billions of people visit pornhub every month. Three years ago, a study by a digital marketing company ranked it among the technology companies having the third largest influence on society in the 21st century, after Google and Facebook. The Canadian company MindGeek, which now owns Pornhub, operates other pornographic sites such as Redtube, Youporn, XTube and others.

The project was started by three students who liked to watch “nudity”. The brand ended up being taken over by a company that took it public by leveraging search stats to the max and creating a porn giant.

Every year, the most popular search queries of users of a given country go viral, get into the media, and are analyzed based on global preferences that are highly variable. People have been fanatically visiting Pornhub since 2008 when it first appeared.

In the documentary, Netflix gives the floor to famous porn stars, Siri Dalh is one of them. In 2018, a decade later, things were about to change for the porn giant. Up to this point, only a small part of the income went to porn stars. In the same year, Model Hub was launched, a parallel site where porn stars and adult content creators could advertise and sell their videos for a certain amount – something like Only Fans. This, thanks to the traffic that the free part of Pornhub brought, became beneficial for porn stars, who took the situation positively.

In order for the creator of video content to earn money on their videos, of course, it was necessary to pass certification. But if someone wanted to post material on the platform for free (as they have done so far), then all they needed was an email. Just like on YouTube, you uploaded a file, gave it a name, added tags, and your video “moved up in the rankings”, while banner ads around it continued to bring in money for the company due to its display.

Ever since Pornhub took over the internet, quantity has played a key role in how pornographic content makes money: the more videos, the more ad revenue.

In the documentary film “Money Shot: The Pornhub story”, famous porn stars say that “for years they have called for verification of users who post content on Pornhub.” They didn’t want their work to be uploaded to a site where any psycho can upload any video they want. In response, they received only the answer that the company is “working on this issue.”

At the center of the Netflix film is a war that has broken out between activists and/or Christian organizations that claim that Pornhub is “cashing in on videos showing victims of sexual exploitation”. Porn stars fall somewhere in between, coming under fire from public opinion. Some were even accused of promoting Pornhub. But how did it all start?

The #Traffickinghub movement began to take over social media in early 2020.

The tweets followed one after the other, claiming that among the millions of videos on the platform, there are videos of people who did not consent to their posting, minors, victims of violence, etc.

We read in The Guardian that this movement was started by an evangelical group in America called Exodus Cry. Lila Mickelveit, spokesperson for the movement, said they collected 2,000,000 signatures to shut down Pornhub on charges of complicity in human trafficking, rape and abuse of men, women and children.

It was the article by journalist Nicholas Christoph “Children of Pornhub” that caused a huge public outcry. It tells the story of Serena K. Flutes, a girl who sent several videos to her boyfriend in her youth. He shared them with his friends and they ended up on Pornhub. Having tried with the help of her mother to remove the compromising video, the girl saw that this helped only partly. And after a while, she saw that they were loaded again. This moment is presented as a “turning point” in her life.

Dani Pinter, Senior Counsel for NCOSE, claims that Pornhub was aware of these circumstances, knowingly allowed such videos to exist on the site, and promoted them because of the demand, which they used.

The outrage was gigantic. The posts have grown. Links to videos appeared one after another. Pornstars started getting messages from friends asking what was going on.

was soon in doubt the question was raised about the quality of moderation, content controlcarried out by the company. In the film, a former MindGeek employee reveals that moderators were instructed to review videos as quickly as possible and reported viewing up to 700 videos a day.

The decision by Mastercard and Visa to stop being the payment method for Pornhub’s services, according to Money Shot, ultimately hurt the content creators, the porn stars themselves. This is the central theme second part of the documentary.

Most of the activists turned to OnlyFans (who previously announced a ban on pornographic content, but soon withdrew it). And here they explain how they had to deal with a situation that both did not solve the problem as such and affected their ability to sell their materials.

After investigating the content of the videos, Pornhub eventually banned all unverified users upload videos and at the same time removed what he said were millions of videos of unverified users already on his site. Lawsuits against the company, of course, continued.

Prior to the adoption of the new SESTA FOSTA, the previous 230 Decency in Communications Act provided that if a person provides interactive services, then he is not responsible for what was published on his site. When Congress decided to act, the Anti-Trafficking Act was passed, which contained provisions “against aiding and abetting trafficking in persons.”

From now on, if there really was a problem with the content of the sites, the companies that own them were also at risk. The Netflix documentary says, however, that because of this law many workers have also returned to hazardous working conditions, and the problem as a whole has not been resolved. “SESTA FOSTA has changed the way sex workers market themselves online. After its adoption, more censorship was introduced on platforms like Twitter and Instagram,” says porn star Siri Dalh. It is worth noting that in September 2022, Instagram permanently banned the Pornhub account.

Yiota Suras, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children), explains how they process messages arriving at the agency’s office. She says, among other things, that “the operation of a pornographic site is similar to the operation of social networking sites. It’s like having a fireworks factory and allowing smoking. You create an explosive situation for the most vulnerable members of our society.”

The documentary’s director, Suzanne Hillinger, told The Guardian that the reality is much more complicated. In her opinion, “the problem of posting materials on the network without consent is not a problem of Pornhub, but of the entire Internet.”

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