The Porn Industry’s Dirty Tactics

Although largely invisible, the porn industry is embedded in the mainstream marketplace and economic structures, with powerful allies in finance, media and communication. Worth billions of dollars, its influence is felt throughout popular culture, where strategic marketing has rebranded it as ‘fun, edgy, chic, sexy and hot.’

Pornhub, the largest and most popular online porn site in the world, represents itself as “the cheeky, winking face of naughty” and shamelessly puts out billboard ads in Times Square; it offers a full range of merchandise and has sophisticated PR machinery that makes it out to be a company with a conscience.

However, the recent scandals surrounding Pornhub reveal that this industry isn’t as harmless as it makes out. A closer look at the poster boy of online porn gives us insight into an industry that’s shadowy, ruthless and criminal.

Beneath the shiny facade that makes it look like any other successful corporation, Pornhub is “secretive and seedy”, lacking the integrity, transparency and accountability we’d expect.¹he website is owned by a company called MindGeek, which happens to control almost every major online porn site in the world, including Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn. Though you’d have a hard time guessing this from Mindgeek’s website, which describes itself in the vaguest possible terms as “a global industry-leading information technology firm.”2

MindGeek’s complex global organisational structure allows it to avoid tax and legislative accountability. In fact, the company changed its name to MindGeek (from Manwin) in 2009 in an attempt to distance itself from various scandals concerning money laundering and tax evasion.

The company is mostly owned by Bernard Bergeman, through a complex network of subsidiaries. Despite being the world’s most successful porn tycoon he, along with other big players and entrepreneurs in this industry, is virtually invisible to the public. In fact, an investigation by Business Insider found that many of the MindGeek executives cited in the media didn’t even exist.Business Insider, P.Coffee (16.12.2020)³

The names of many of the company’s senior executives who feature in corporate filings do not appear in internet searches, leaving little or no trace of who they are.⁴

Inherently high-risk business model

Serious allegations were made about Pornhub for years before the Traffickinghub campaign of 2020 collated mounting evidence of the site’s complicity in hosting illegal pornographic videos. As Nicholas Kristof summarised in an article for the New York Times:

“Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.”⁵

Let’s be clear: no one was assuming that Pornhub was deliberately or systematically trafficking women or hosting videos of rape and child sexual abuse material. However, having a business model which effectively facilitates the upload and distribution of virtually any kind of pornographic material and being deliberately lax about moderation has been deliberate. It’s allowed the site to explode in scale, popularity and profitability, which has very much served its commercial interests.

By exploiting the loophole of Section 230 CDA Protections which immunise tech platforms from liability for material published by its users, Pornhub has been able to accumulate vast amounts of third-party and user-generated content. This in turn has led to it being able to gather high quantities of user data and high advertising revenue.

Denial and defensiveness

When evidence of Pornhub’s wrongdoing came to light, the company showed no hint of compassion or remorse. Refusing to take the accusations seriously (let alone investigate), they responded with defensiveness, flat denial and bare-faced lies.⁶

While MindGeek boasted of having “a vast and extensive team of moderators”, founder of the Traffickinghub campaign Layla Mickelwait points out that a whistleblower revealed that they had in fact had fewer than 30 “content formatters” per shift to review the millions of videos uploaded to all of their “tube sites,” including Pornhub. They also lied about responding to victims about reports of illegal videos: “in reality, requests and comments about these filmed sexual crimes were repeatedly ignored, covered-up, and demeaned.”⁷

If Pornhub really had cared about victims, it would not have been sued by 40 women who say it profited from a sex-trafficking operation by a content partner. The courts heard that “…MindGeek knew the GirlsDoPorn California-based porn website was trafficking its victims by using fraud, coercion, and intimidation. Despite this knowledge, MindGeek continued to partner with Girls Do Porn, never bothering to investigate or question its business partner regarding the mounting evidence of sex trafficking that MindGeek received…”8

Pornhub itself is not averse to using similar tactics of intimidation. Laila Mickelwait, who headed up the Traffickinghub campaign, describes the campaign of intimidation against her and even against the victims and survivors themselves. She writes in the Washington Post: It has been infuriating and heartbreaking to witness Pornhub child sexual abuse victims who dared to speak publicly be threatened, harassed, blackmailed, physically attacked, and in many cases effectively silenced.”⁹

Not fit for purpose

Pornhub’s defensiveness was peppered with fair-sounding PR spin reiterating its commitment to safeguarding and moderation.

“We have… a robust internal policy by which we remove this content, including scanning all content to determine whether it is consensual or not, employing a team of expertly trained human reviewers who monitor for specific cues and criteria, and by making it as easy as possible to flag illegal content.”¹⁰

This sounds all very well and good, but dig a little deeper and it’s clear that Pornhub’s safeguards are flimsy, reactive and not fit for purpose – not least because the vast quantity of ‘pseudo-child pornography’ and violence / rape-themed pornography hosted on Pornhub means it is often extremely difficult to distinguish between the ‘real’ and the staged or simulated.

Pornhub’s reactive approach of relying on users or even on victims themselves to identify and to flag up abusive content once it’s already being hosted, shared and monetized on its site is evidently not fit for purpose. But a more proactive approach would involve interfering with its inherently high-risk, high-profit business model.

Rather than admitting that money is the driver, Pornhub will sometimes imply that its moderation is driven by high-minded ideology. The company appeals to notions of free speech as a defence for dubious material. For example, in response to videos depicting schoolgirls, gang rape or hidden camera footage, Pornhub told the BBC that although some find such “fantasies” “extreme and inappropriate”, they nonetheless “appeal to many people around the world and are in fact protected by various freedom of speech laws.”¹¹

Failure to enforce its own standards

Online porn platforms recognise that even with fantasy-fuelling, taboo-shattering pornography, there need to be limits, and lines that should not be crossed. This is why their comprehensive terms of service carefully express what content and behaviours are permitted. Much of the material Pornhub defends in one breath as ‘free speech’ is in fact prohibited by its own terms and conditions.

Pornhub says that it doesn’t allow even the depiction or simulation of almost every kind of illegality, from underage sexual activity and non-consensual activity to depictions of rape, abuse and racism. However, even a cursory glance at the site shows that it hosts a huge amount of such material.

For example, Pornhub prohibits search terms like “children”, “underage” and “child”, but allows “babysitter”, “little”, “young”, “barely legal” and “exxxtrasmall”, which bring up videos with such titles as: “Tiny Babysitter Does What She Must TO [sic] Keep Her Job” and “Cute schoolgirl gets f***ed by her english teacher”.

Regarding non-consensual content, it bans the terms “rape” and “assault” but allows “violation”, “used like meat”, “stop”, “crying” and “sex for rent”, search tags that show videos like “Young chubby toilet slave gets pissed on and fucked with her head in toilet and stepdaughter got stuck – daddy uses her helplessness to f**k her like a doll.”

Pornhub bans the terms “revenge porn” and “spy cam”, but allows “real hidden camera”, “spy” and “voyeur changing room”, and is full of videos with titles such as “Freaky ob-gyn doctor records his mature female patient on hidden camera” and “HIDDEN CAMERA IN THE WOMEN’S FITTING ROOM College freshman fucked from behind Onlyfans leak (@that1iggirl).”

Driven by self-interest

Pornhub not only fails to enforce its own terms and conditions – it does so deliberately.

A former moderator at Pornhub suggests that the company is only too aware of the game it’s playing: “Our job was to find weird excuses to keep videos on our sites. [My team] joked about the circuitous logic that managers employed when they approved questionable videos…”¹²

Why is it doing this? Because in the saturated marketplace of online porn, Pornhub recognises the fact that many of its best customers will have built up a ‘tolerance’ to certain kinds of softer pornography and will require more niche, extreme or hardcore material in order to maintain arousal.

In fact, Pornhub does more than turn a blind eye to violating material: its algorithms actively promote this material to its millions of users, with the incentive of keeping its best consumers engaged on its site for longer – which is of course good for the bottom line.

Hypocritical

Pornhub gives lip service to its commitment to fighting online child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSA/E), stating how it’s “long been an advocate for child protection and actively work[s] to combat child sex abuse material (CSAM) around the globe.”¹³

However, Pornhub’s behind-the-scenes action demonstrates that its words amount to nothing but empty tokenism and PR spin. Through its powerful lobbying arm, the Free Speech Coalition, the industry has demonstrated that it is in fact more interested in shaping regulation to support its evolving business model than in shaping its own business model to support the fight against CSA.

Indeed it has put millions of dollars into fighting regulation that is designed to protect minors from sexual exploitation and abuse; for example:

Pornhub fought to overturn the Child Pornography Prevention Act in 1996, which prohibited the representation of any image that “is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.” In 2002, it succeeded in securing a Supreme Court decision that overturned the restriction and permitted the representation of young-looking girls in pornography as long as the performers were actually over 18.¹⁴

Pornhub invested a million dollars into fighting against Section 2257 of the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act, which required the industry to keep strict and transparent records of performers’ ages, and to allow federal agents to inspect them at any time. In 2018, it succeeded in immunising itself from legal or financial liability.

“Like other major industries that generate harmful social impacts, the porn industry wages legal and lobbying strategies against existing and proposed regulations while simultaneously creating a discourse that links its industry to wider social ambitions like sexual emancipation and free speech.”
Dr. Heather Bruskell Evans, Academic and Activist

Backed into a corner

In a ground-breaking article published in the New York Times published on December 4th, journalist Nicolas Kristof made the wider world aware of the abuses occurring on Pornhub: “Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.”¹⁵

Having previously responded with denial and defensiveness, the article forced Pornhub to take more radical action, and the company announced sweeping reforms, including a tighter verification process for users who want to upload content, and increased moderation that involves third-party accountability and greater transparency.¹⁶

Though a definitive improvement, these reforms were far from comprehensive and proved insufficient to prevent Visa and Mastercard from severing financial ties with the platform in 2020. This forced Pornhub to take the drastic measure of removing the entirety of its user-generated content (some nine million videos).

The global porn giant took decisive action only because it was backed into a corner by public and corporate pressure. However, there is no assurance that its recent improvements will remain in place. Nor can we assume that similar actions will be rolled out by other online pornography platforms. Without external constraints, why would they?