A new documentary dropped today on Netflix called “Money Shot: The Pornhub Story.”
It’s a very no-frills glimpse into the rise of Pornhub and the wash of controversy the adult-content website has faced since its inception.
But buried among the business model explanations was a disturbing revelation that Pornhub moderators were often seriously overburdened by content – and they missed a lot as a result.
See: KENDALL JENNER AND BAD BUNNY ARE STEALING THE SPOTLIGHT
Human Moderation on Pornhub is Wholly Inadequate
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One Pornhub exec testified in Canada, “We had human moderation on our sites when it was a word that wasn’t even – it didn’t even exist. When Facebook and any of the other main platforms in the world never used it. These were all things that we started. We weren’t public about it, but these are things we did since the beginning.”
But an anonymous moderator who spoke to documentary makers explained that their reason for speaking out was that, “I think the company could have done more to prevent certain things and chose not to. And only really changed some things after it got in trouble.”
The person added, “I was a moderator, I worked for less than two years. Some of the moderation happened in Canada. Most of it happened in Cyprus. When I worked there, there was a little over 30 moderators. Every moderator had to review around 700 videos a day, but it was expected for us to do more.
So of course they were fast-forwarding, skipping through, no sound – which is key. Because sometimes the women – or children – in the video are crying, yelling, saying, ‘no,’ saying, ‘stop,’ and they’re not catching any of that.
Dani Pinter, senior legal counsel at NCOSE currently going after Pornhub for their exploitative practices, explains that each moderator was tasked with viewing 800 to 1,000 videos per each eight-hour shift. She added, “that’s impossible. So of course they were fast-forwarding, skipping through, no sound – which is key. Because sometimes the women – or children – in the video are crying, yelling, saying, ‘no,’ saying, ‘stop,’ and they’re not catching any of that.”
The anon mod continues, “we were scrubbing through videos as fast we could. Even if we thought that we were being diligent with our work, we would still miss a few videos every now and then.”
Pinter says that the company boasted that all of their videos were reviewed, but she put it in perspective by explaining that Pornhub’s traffic is comparable to some of the biggest social media sites – but Facebook employed 15,000 moderators. For a site that isn’t primarily focused on sexually explicit content. And even the Facebook moderators have come forward with stories talking about how overwhelmed and unprepared they were for their task.
Anon mod adds that you can’t tell a person’s age from a video. “It’s a really hard thing to determine if a 17 year old is more than 18. They could be 14 or they could be 19. Basically, we would just guess and then my manager would decide if the video would be taken down for good or if it will go live again. The rules constantly changed.”
Pornhub Abandoned Its Obligation to Moderate Material
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In the documentary, experts explain that Pornhub and its parent company Mindgeek had an extraordinary obligation to moderate its content and insure that only adults engaging in consensual activity was uploaded to the website.
Instead, they seemed to take a carefree and hands-off approach.
One woman reached out to Michael Bowe at the Manhattan law firm Brown Rudnick to tell her story and try to get help.
She says that when she was just 14, an explicit video of her was uploaded to the site. She posed as her mom and told the company that the child in the video was just 14 and demanded that they remove it. Pornhub took two weeks to remove the video.
But despite promising that the content couldn’t be re-uploaded, it was. Over and over again.
30 women are now filing a lawsuit against Pornhub, accusing them of running a “criminal enterprise” and exploiting them for profit.
Bowe is representing the complainants and cites racketeering laws that are often reserved for drug gangs.
The conversation around Pornhub seems like an easy, black-and-white issue. Because no one should ever argue that non-consensual material is acceptable.
However, Pornhub is happy to throw their content creators under the bus and continue to rake in ad revenue while pretending to make changes.
It’s happened before, and it’s happening now.
To make real change that benefits both victims and innocent adult performers, Pornhub will have to take accountability and make a systemic change from the ground up.
“Money Shot: The Pornhub Story” is available to stream now on Netflix.