In an unprecedented move, Pornhub, the popular pornography website, has deleted more than 10 million videos that were posted on its site.
It is said that these were all videos posted from unverified accounts and the company stated that, “As part of our policy to ban unverified uploaders, we have now also suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or members of the Model Program.”
This move is coming after an extensive New York Times article called out the site for allowing videos to be uploaded that featured child pornography, rape, and other sexual acts being performed without consent.
Pornhub now choosing to delete millions of its videos that are not from verified accounts is a big change from its previous policy where anyone could upload a video on the site as long as they have an account on it.
Kind of like a YouTube but exclusive just for porn videos.
What All Happened That Caused Pornhub To Do This?
On December 4th, 2020 Nicholas Kristof wrote a column in The New York Times, titled, “The Children of Pornhub”.
The piece focused on how Pornhub seemingly has a plethora of videos on its site that are recordings of women being sexually assaulted, including minors too.
As per a line from the article, Kristof wrote “The issue is not pornography but rape. Let’s agree that promoting assaults on children or on anyone without consent is unconscionable.”
The column didn’t just accuse the site of wrong practices but also asked Visa and Mastercard, credit card companies associated with Pornhub, to call off their association.
Kristof wrote that “I don’t see why search engines, banks or credit card companies should bolster a company that monetizes sexual assaults on children or unconscious women.”
Just after this, on 8th December 2020, Pornhub did ban any unverified users from uploading content on the site, but it seems that the damage had been done.
Just a few days later, both Visa and Mastercard stated that they would be pulling their charging services from the site and not work with them anymore.
Apparently, this was enough for Pornhub to scramble and do damage control as it started to delete millions upon millions of videos from its site.
Although the exact number is not known, a site called Motherboard did state in a Monday report that the video count on the site had gone down to 4.7 million from the earlier 13.5 million.
The next morning, the video count had gone down even further to 2.9 million, showing that Pornhub had deleted more than 10 million videos in just around a day or so.
Read More: Pornhub Creates 112 Coronavirus Porn Videos To Raise Awareness About The Disease
Reports now state that only official content partners or members of Pornhub’s Model Program can upload videos and the rest will be removed after doing verification and review of them, said to start in 2021.
Pornhub on their part did try to clear their name and stated to Business Insider that, “Pornhub has actively worked to employ extensive measures to protect the platform from such content. These measures include a vast team of human moderators dedicated to manually reviewing every single upload, a thorough system for flagging, reviewing and removing illegal material, robust parental controls, and a variety of automated detection technologies.”
Pornhub And Its Problems
This is not the first time that Pornhub is being called out for hosting child pornography or videos of sexual assault that only serve to affect the mental health of the victims if by chance it is brought before them.
In October of 2018, the news went viral when it came out that a 15-year-old who had been missing for a year from Florida in the U.S. was found after videos of her reportedly being raped were uploaded on Pornhub.
Reports stated that 58 such videos of the minor girl were found on the site, although Pornhub later stated that they had removed the videos once the matter came to light.
In another instance, in February 2020, the BBC reported that a woman from Ohio in the U.S. had found a video of when she was raped as a 14-year-old girl on the site. As per reports, the victim claimed that getting the video to be removed was a long process as she requested for months for Pornhub to take down the video but did not get any response.
Allegedly, it is only when she posed as a lawyer and indicated taking legal action that the porn site took down the video.
There was much noise around that time, with an online petition even managing to get over a million signatures. The petition demanded that Pornhub be shut down and its executives be held accountable for aiding trafficking and profiting from it too.
Pornhub, however, believes that all this is just a sort of witch-hunt against pornography. As per reports, they said, “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,” and further added that they are being targetted by groups “dedicated to abolishing pornography [and] banning material they claim is obscene.”
Pornhub has though said that they will be stricter with their uploading policies and content to make sure this is not repeated.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Business Insider India, BBC News, TechCrunch
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: Pornhub Delete videos, Pornhub Delete unverified videos, pornhub, sex work, pornhub unverified videos, porhub purge videos, pornhub child pornography
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