Pornhub fights back as petition seeks to shut it down

Pornhub has hit out at an online petition calling on the US Department of Justice to pull the plug on the adult entertainment platform for hosting videos of sex trafficking victims.

This has reached almost 700,000 signatures. It claims that Pornhub is generating millions in advertising and membership revenue with 42 billion visits and six million videos uploaded per year. Yet it has no system in place to verify reliably the age or consent of those featured in the pornographic content it hosts and profits from. 

Also of interest: Pornhub goes global with free Premium service access

“We have a steadfast commitment to eradicating and fighting any and all illegal content on the internet, including non-consensual content and child sexual abuse material. Any suggestion otherwise is categorically and factually inaccurate,” Blake White, VP, Pornhub, told RTIH.

“While the wider tech community must continue to develop new methods to rid the internet of this horrific content, Pornhub is actively working to put in place state-of-the-art, comprehensive safeguards on its platform to combat this material.”

These actions include a system for flagging, reviewing and removing all illegal material, employing a team of human moderators dedicated to manually reviewing all uploads to the site, and using a variety of digital fingerprinting solutions. 

The company is deploying automated detection technologies such as YouTube's CSAI Match and Microsoft's PhotoDNA as added layers of protection to keep unauthorised content off the site. It also taps Vobile, a fingerprinting software that scans new uploads for potential matches to unauthorised materials to protect against any banned video being re-uploaded to the platform.

“We are actively working on expanding our safety measures and adding new features and products to our platform to this end, as they become available. Furthermore, we will continue to work with law enforcement efforts and child protection non-profits in the goal of eliminating any and all illegal content across the internet,” White said.

He labelled the aforementioned petition “factually wrong and intentionally misleading”. He added that it was created and is promoted by a radical right wing fundamentalist group in the United States - “a group with founders who have long vilified and attacked LGBTQ communities and women’s rights groups, aligned themselves with hate groups, and espoused extremist and despicable language.”  

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