Pornhub removes all unverified videos from its platform

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Pornhub has removed all content uploaded by unverified users from its platform – about 80 per cent of its total videos – in the wake of allegations that it hosts child abuse content.  

More than 10 million videos have been removed as part of the Canadian-owned pornography site’s purge, according to figures on its homepage, following allegations it was ‘infested’ with videos of rape and underage sex. 

There were 13.5 million videos on Pornhub on Sunday evening, as noted by Motherboard, but the total stood at just 2.9 million as of Tuesday lunchtime.

Since its launch in 2007, any Pornhub user signed up to the site had been able to upload their own content. 

Last week, however, Pornhub banned unverified users from posting new content, following allegations made in a New York Times column that it hosted child sexual abuse material.

Pornhub has gone a step further this week by removing all previously uploaded content that was not created by official content partners or users signed up to its Model Program initiative (who earn ad revenue from their videos).  

The site said in a statement that it has ‘no tolerance’ for content that shows sexual abuse of children and denied it knowingly allowed such images. 

‘Any assertion that we allow CSAM [child sexual abuse material] is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue,’ Pornhub said. 

It comes after Mastercard and Visa halted payments on Pornhub last week in the wak of the allegations. 

Pornhub is the 10th most visited website in the world, according to figures from web analytics company SimilarWeb. 

The site is owned by parent company MindGeek, a privately held pornography conglomerate based in Montreal, Canada.

MindGeek also owns other popular adult video portals, including YouPorn and RedTube.

‘As part of our policy to ban unverified uploaders, we have now also suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or members of the Model Program,’ Pornhub said in a blog post dated Monday.

‘This means every piece of Pornhub content is from verified uploaders, a requirement that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute.’

Some time in 2021, Pornhub will implement a verification process so that ‘any user can upload content upon successful completion of identification protocol’.

Pornhub will also be releasing its first transparency report in 2021, outlining the results of moderation from the previous year.  

Pornhub also said that two groups that have ‘spearheaded the campaign against our company’ – the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly known as Morality in Media) and Exodus Cry/TraffickingHub. 

‘These are organisations dedicated to abolishing pornography, banning material they claim is obscene, and shutting down commercial sex work,’ Pornhub said in the blog post. 

‘These are the same forces that have spent 50 years demonising Playboy, the National Endowment for the Arts, sex education, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and even the American Library Association.

‘It is clear that Pornhub is being targeted not because of our policies and how we compare to our peers, but because we are an adult content platform.’  

Pornhub did not address in the blog post how these two groups are related to Nicholas Kristof’s report in the New York Times.

The column, published December 4, asserted that among the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each year, a majority ‘probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and non-consensual violence’. 

‘[The] site is infested with rape videos,’ Kristof said in the article.

‘It monetises child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.’

Kristof’s report highlighted a number of young girls who appeared in videos uploaded to Pornhub without their consent. 

Even after the videos were flagged and removed, downloaded copies continued to circulate, often with severe personal consequences, he said. 

‘Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are,’ Kristof said of the site, which had 42 billion site visits last year. 

‘The issue is not pornography but rape. Let’s agree that promoting assaults on children or on anyone without consent is unconscionable.’ 

Pornhub, the report said, also let users download the videos in question directly from its site, which permits anyone to repost the clips repeatedly and without limit. 

In response on December 8, Pornhub released a statement pledging to take ‘major steps to further protect our community’. 

‘Going forward, we will only allow properly identified users to upload content. We have banned downloads,’ the site said. 

As part of changes implemented last week, videos can’t be downloaded or exported from the site by users, other than through paid downloads, which are triggered through the company’s verified system. 

Pornhub also pledged to increase moderation of content currently on the platform through its newly established ‘Red Team’.

Red Team is being tasked with ‘proactively sweeping content already uploaded for potential violations and identifying any breakdowns in the moderation process’.

Its human moderators manually review ‘every single upload,’ as well as automated detection technologies, Pornhub said.  

Shortly, after the New York Times report was published, billionaire investor Bill Ackman called on Mastercard and Visa to temporarily withhold payments to Pornhub.   

Ackman also suggested it should be made illegal for porn sites to post videos before they are reviewed by a monitor, and until the ages and consent of participants have been validated.

By December 10, Mastercard and Visa had both taken the decision to block their customers from using the credit cards to make purchases on Pornhub, as a result of the New York Times report. 

Mastercard took the decision after its own investigation confirmed violations of standards prohibiting unlawful conduct on the site.  Mastercard said it was also investigating other websites for potential illegal content. 

Visa said it was suspending use of its cards on Pornhub even though its own investigation was incomplete.

‘Given the allegations of illegal activity, Visa is suspending Pornhub’s acceptance privileges pending the completion of our ongoing investigation,’ Visa tweeted. 

Pornhub, in a statement, called the actions ‘exceptionally disappointing’.

‘This news is crushing for the hundreds of thousands of models who rely on our platform for their livelihoods,’ Pornhub said.

Dawn Hawkins, senior vice president and executive director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, said her organisation had met with Visa and Mastercard earlier this year to ask them to stop processing payments for Pornhub.

‘We are grateful that both companies will make these significant changes,’ she said. 

Kristof’s column also drew reactions from politicians including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who said his government was working with police and security officials to address the issues it raised.

In the US, Senator Josh Hawley said he will introduce legislation to create a federal right to sue for every person ‘coerced or trafficked or exploited by sites like Pornhub’.

REVEALED: Pornhub founders are four Canadian college friends dubbed ‘the kings of smut’ who made millions by creating the YouTube of porn in 2007 but now face a reckoning as Visa and Mastercard cut ties with their site over child rape claims  

When PornHub was hit with claims that it is hosting child rape videos on its site earlier this week, prompting Visa and Mastercard to cut ties with the site, its reign as the world’s leading porn website was plunged into sudden uncertainty.  

While the website is ubiquitous, little is known about its owners and operators or how much it is worth. 

They are Stephane Manos, Ouissam Youssef, Feras Antoon and Matt Keezer, who founded the site in 2007, two years after YouTube was founded, in Montreal, Quebec. 

They all knew each other for years while attending Concordia University and had a shared love of the internet and pornography.  

Antoon is the only one who retains a formal active role as the CEO of PornHub’s parent company MindGeek. MindGeek is a private company whose headquarters are now in Luxembourg. It has more than 1,200 employees.  

It’s unclear who came up with the PornHub concept but Keezer is who bought the domain name PornHub for $2,750 from someone he’d met at a Playboy mansion party.

Keezer now runs a flight-booking website and Manos and Youssef head up Valsoft, which acquires and scales up software companies. 

Originally, they bonded over a love of foosball in college and it was their shared interest in technology and porn that drove the venture, they say. 

In 2003, Keezer, Manos, and Youssef, then students, had already founded websites like Jugg World, A** Listing, KeezMovies, and XXX Rated Chicks, where people could look at pictures of porn and download short videos but it was nothing like PornHub, where they could surf and browse thousands of videos that were hosted all in one place.  

Back then, those sites were run under a parent company known as Mansef.  

In an interview with New York Magazine in 2011, Antoon explained how the three others focused at first on featuring women with large breasts.  

‘The big-t*ts niche was so cheap,’ he told New York Magazine. 

They then realized there were other ‘niches’ like breasts in general, MILFs and other categories.

‘They saw, wow, that t*t niche is huge. 

‘Then they realized that the MILF niche—the older-woman niche—is even bigger. 

‘And they became the masters of the big-t*t–MILF niche,’ he said. 

Together, they founded Brazzers – a pay site whose name was a play on their Middle Eastern backgrounds and their pronunciation of the word ‘brothers.’

Under Brazzers, they started rolling out more and more porn videos by contracting with producers in LA and Vegas and having them put together high-quality videos. 

Their signature was, as Antoon described, large-breasted women and so they were credited with the revival of breast implants in the industry. 

The operation continued to grow and Antoon – who is Manos’ brother-in-law – was brought in to help. 

Every year, the company doubled in size.  

The roles were, according to New York Magazine’s profile on them, as follows;  ‘Youssef was the business visionary, Manos the salesman and motivator, Keezer the savant of search-engine optimization.’ 

Antoon called Keezer ‘by far the best in the world’, saying: ‘Who can get “porn” and “sex” to be No. 1? We’re the No. 1 result [for each]. You know how hard that is?’  

PornHub went online in early 2007 and quickly grew in success but was hated by the industry which complained that it – like YouTube – was ripping off pay-for websites by slapping content on their sites without charging people for it and instead making their money through banner ads. 

It was not part of Mansef but instead was managed under the company Interhub. 

In 2010, after rolling out several other brands under the umbrella company, Interhub and Mansef were sold to German millionaire Fabian Thylmann for an estimated $140million. 

Following the acquisition, Thylmann changed the company’s name to Manwin and continued to snap up more pornographic websites after raising $362million in financing from Colbeck Capital. 

Three years later, he sold his stake back to Antoon for $100million.  By now, the company had been rebranded as MindGeek. 

Antoon, according to Le Journal de Montreal, bought two sprawling luxury condos for $730,000 in 2017. 

Another article from the newspaper reported that the men boasted online about investing some of their money in real estate both in the US and oversees.  

They are said to have invested in a 600-condo development in Montreal and one of the men mentioned investing in Florida and the Middle East. 

None share any details of their private lives online. They do not have public social media pages. 

In a 2016 interview with Vice, Mark Antoon described MindGeek more as a tech company than anything to do with porn. 

Montreal, he said, was the ideal hub for it. 

‘Montreal provides an ideal setting for tech talent. It has a unique multicultural backdrop, a great joie de vivre, and an affordable standard of living that make it a very attractive option for tech resources,’ he said.  

MindGeek, which is based in Luxembourg, with offices in Montreal, Cyprus and London, has been criticized for its monopolistic power in the industry, due to its ownership of major production companies as well as streaming and distribution services. 

Under the helm of parent company MindGeek, Pornhub currently has over 22million registered users worldwide and draws a staggering 120million visitors daily, placing it above Amazon and Netflix in online traffic rankings.