As of May 2020, Pornhub had 706,000 videos flagged for issues such as child rape, and most were not removed until they were flagged more than 16 times, according to an internal document.
Internal documents created by porn site Pornhub revealed that the site had more than 706,000 videos flagged for issues such as child rape as of May 2020. The New York Times has sharply criticized, 'What's going on in the minds of people who work for porn companies that make money from videos of child rape?'
Opinion | What People at Pornhub Were Thinking When It Shared Videos of Child Rape - The New York Times
Pornhub is facing a civil lawsuit from an Alabama woman who claims that when she was 16 years old, she was filmed engaging in sex acts and, at least once, drugged and raped, and that the footage was posted to Pornhub.
During discovery in this case, the court inadvertently released internal Pornhub documents, totaling thousands of pages, most of which were created before 2020.
The internal documents also show Pornhub employees expressing concern that 'I hope people won't get in trouble for having this video on their computer,' as well as comments expressing displeasure with CSAM, such as 'It contains a lot of very explicit and disturbing CSAM (online child sexual abuse content).'
An internal document created in May 2020 said that 706,000 videos depicting problematic acts such as rape and child assault had been flagged by users as 'problematic videos.' However, it also became clear that Pornhub did not consider removing these videos unless they had been flagged at least 16 times.
The internal documents also point out that Pornhub has made it much harder to report problematic content by restricting flagging to registered users only: 'This will significantly reduce the number of reports we get,' one Pornhub employee wrote in an internal message.
In another case, an employee advised another employee not to report child pornography to a manager, to which the other responded, 'You don't want to know how much child pornography we've ignored in the last five years, do you?' Another case was about a child sexual abuse video that had been viewed 684 million times before it was removed.
Pornhub executives also appear to be obsessed with attracting as many viewers as possible, including pedophiles, and making money from them. Internal documents revealed that Pornhub executives recommended banning words like 'infant' and 'child' from video descriptions, while still allowing words like 'cruel,' 'infantile,' 'forced,' 'snuff,' 'unwilling,' 'minor,' and 'intoxicated.'
Other internal messages show Pornhub struggling to restrict content without losing popular content, with one executive debating whether to ban phrases like 'young girl,' 'cries during first time anal sex' and 'abused by daddy,' before ultimately deciding the phrases were acceptable.
Pornhub also said that 'a person should not be banned from Pornhub for making money by posting sexually explicit videos of children.'
Pornhub, as well as other porn sites under its umbrella such as Redtube, Tube8, and YouPorn, do not create pornographic videos themselves. They simply provide a platform for users to post videos, and it is the users themselves who create the pornographic content.
The New York Times reached out to Pornhub about the leaked documents, but the company said it couldn't comment on questions about internal documents or litigation. Pornhub stressed that it has tightened its policies and is working hard to remove non-consensual content from the site.
'It's clear that Pornhub has made great strides in recent years, but the internal documents reveal what it was doing behind the scenes before it changed its ways,' The New York Times wrote. 'And Pornhub's actions were 'relentless in its pursuit of market share without any regard for the safety of the people in its videos.''
While there are calls for severe criminal punishment for perpetrators of child sexual abuse, voices are mixed on platforms that spread content like Pornhub, which, with the support of donors and search engines, exploits countless girls, The New York Times pointed out.
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