Users of online pornography witnessed a wild shake up in the week before Christmas 2020, with the world’s most popular porn site removing more than 10 million videos from their public collection.
This is the latest, though certainly not the last, bout between the porn industry and human rights advocates. On the one side is a massive industry servicing a huge demand and with strong financial motives. On the other side is a broad movement concerned about the psychological effects on individual viewers and producers of porn, about long term social impact, and about frequent reports of coercion and under-age sexual exploitation.
The current fracas was triggered by a column in the New York Times on 4 December that highlighted how Pornhub “monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.” The article noted the huge volumes of videos on Pornhub that are self-described as featuring under-age sexual participants or depicting rape, the ease with which anyone can both download and upload illegal and abusive content, the inadequacy of the website’s moderation processes, and the lack of responsiveness to requests to remove illegal videos.
Pornhub’s business model, like that of dozens of other porn sites, allows people to upload, view, and download content with anonymity so there can be no verification of anyone’s age, no checking of whether the people in the videos were willing participants, nor whether they consented to the material being distributed. Since content can be downloaded so easily, even if a porn site removes illegal or non-consensual content, there may already be thousands of copies scattered throughout the world that can still be viewed and re-uploaded to the same or different sites.
Several days after the New York Times article, Pornhub announced changes that included verifying users before they are allowed to upload videos, removing the facility to download videos, and an expanded moderation team.
On 10 December, Mastercard and Visa announced that they would no longer provide merchant services to MindGeek—the company that controls Pornhub and half a dozen other porn sites. Other card providers later followed suit. PayPal had made that decision back in November 2019.
MindGeek subsequently removed over 10 million videos from Pornhub—all the ones that had been uploaded by unverified users—perhaps 70-80% of their total collection.
These events are not the result of a conservative sexual agenda that seeks to end all pornography, though certainly there are voices calling for that too. The issue here is the on-going prevalence of human coercion and abuse. The stance against Pornhub and other similar sites is not about sexual purity, but about violence, lack of consent, and sexual trauma imposed on children.
Many of these forms of abuse can be classified as modern slavery or human trafficking, although those terms are ambiguous and their scope is open to debate. The traditional understanding of slavery—owning another person—has not been legal in most countries for a long time. Nevertheless, there continue to be millions of people globally who are coerced or exploited to the point where they no longer have any control over their own bodies. Repeatedly forcing people into sex and distributing videos of the abuse is one form of that coercion among many.
There is a continuum of coercion with freedom at one end and slavery at the other. Although we may not agree about the point at which coercion turns into slavery, there are many examples of porn videos that show extreme violence, videos with clear indications that the participant does not consent, and videos of children—even infants and babies—being sexually abused.
The recent pressure on MindGeek and the subsequent adjustments to their websites are unlikely to mean that everyone will now start playing nicely with each other. Given the dual motivations of sex and money, we are more likely to see workarounds and a gradual ratcheting up of basically the same behaviour as before.
Commercial porn sites will find other ways to collect money. Keen porn viewers will find other tools that allow them to download the content even if that violates Pornhub’s terms and conditions. Other porn sites in less controllable jurisdictions will fill any gap with illegal videos. Private video-swapping groups will gain a larger share of the porn pie. Enthusiasts for the macabre, under-age, or violent porn will increasingly turn to marketplaces on the dark web.
Nevertheless, the pressure to hold MindGeek accountable does have the effect of denormalising violent and under-age sexual abuse. The trajectory of porn production and viewing over the past few decades has been a spiral with gradually increasing violence and decreasing age. There is still plenty of garden-variety porn, but the ready availability via the Internet of extreme sexual videos has made many people think they depict normal and acceptable behaviours.
Recent events quite rightly call that assumption into question. Coercing sexual activities is neither normal nor acceptable. Recording someone’s rape and distributing the recording is neither normal nor acceptable. Finding sexual pleasure in viewing such recordings is neither normal nor acceptable. Recording consensual sex acts but later distributing them without the participants’ consent is neither normal nor acceptable. All of that is even less normal and less acceptable when it involves minors.
What remains to be seen is whether the extensive social pressure will be sufficient to change the way we view sexual abuse. This abuse is not simply a technological challenge—as though preventing downloads will solve it—nor simply a financial one—as though removing some payment options will solve it. The core issue is whether our society can survive if our technology, our financial structures, and our shared values continue to enable interpersonal abuse to be committed, recorded, and monetised.
Why is there demand for rape videos? Why do people choose to watch young children being sexually abused? We will need to address those demand-side questions before any supply-side interventions are going to be effective.