PornHub, the adult video content streaming platform, has responded to reports of a severe lack of regulation in the type of content it hosts. After a New York Times investigation revealed how PornHub is infested with videos of rape, violent sexual acts and child pornography, the company has now announced that going forward, it will ban downloading of all content on its platform. Furthermore, it will also restrict who can upload and share content on the platform, and spoke about a recently launched ‘Trusted Flagger Programme'. Finally, it also stated that next year, it will also publish its first transparency report.
The New York Times report revealed how problematic content such as child pornography, revenge porn, rape and other such videos are available aplenty and easily on PornHub, raising a huge question on the ethics, content guidelines and moderation that PornHub deployed. Answering these claims, PornHub stated that going forward, it will only allow verified users and verified content partners to upload content on its website. Each piece of content must comply with its specified content and community guidelines, as well as its terms of service.
To ensure that this is followed, PornHub said that it will also employ a newly instated ‘Red Team', which will actively and manually monitor search terms on the platform. By doing so, the team will comb the platform of any problematic content, which may have somehow evaded PornHub's automatic content moderation efforts. It will also reportedly allow content downloads for only its paid ‘PornHub Model Programme', but restrict it for all other free visitors on its site.
By taking on all these steps and processes, PornHub will hope to make a sizeable difference in terms of the quality of videos. More importantly, it should also help the company remove pieces that would not have otherwise been discovered.
