A petition calling for the banning of the most visited adult site in the world – Pornhub – has met a stern and defiant response from the site’s owners. 300,000 people have already signed the petition, organized by a religious extremist outfit hoping to exploit concern over the tragic and isolated case of a 15 year old trafficking victim whose videos were uploaded and remained online for a brief period.
The Pornhub official statement on the matter read as follows :
“Pornhub has 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. 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 robust system for flagging, reviewing and removing all illegal material, employing an extensive team of human moderators dedicated to manually reviewing all uploads to the site, and using a variety of digital fingerprinting solutions. These include but are not limited to Microsoft’s PhotoDNA, a technology that aids in finding and removing known images of child exploitation, as well as Vobile, a state-of-the-art fingerprinting software that scans any new uploads for potential matches to unauthorized 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, Pornhub 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.”
It’s not difficult to see that the real motive behind this petition is a puritanical crusade against porn. The religious organization plotting Pornhub’s downfall – Exodus Cry – claim not to want to ban all porn, but rather only sites like Pornhub, which they allege do not take adequate measures to prevent illegal material from being uploaded.
Could Pornhub be doing more to prevent abuse videos appearing on their site? Probably, and it would be a good thing if this sad case led to such increased measures. However, it’s certain that the major tube sites like Pornhub, which alone has over 20 billion visits each year, do far more than the hundreds of small and dubious free tube sites that would quickly fill the vacuum and hoover up most of those 33 billion yearly visits, if the big sites were closed down due to government regulation.
What’s really at issue is whether ‘amateur porn’ videos should be legal to be published online. Despite noble initiatives that utilize cutting edge AI – such as Microsoft’s PhotoDNA which Pornhub does make use of – there will likely never be a foolproof way of preventing and/or quickly detecting illegal material that has been uploaded by a member on a ‘porn community’ site the size of Pornhub.
The argument that ‘if it saves one victim’ is deeply flawed, or at least would appear to be simply a guise for other motives – if only because we can see it’s not used in virtually any other walk of life. Thousands of children are killed by cars each year, and yet nobody calls for cars to be banned. What we do is try to make cars and roads safer. Road transport, and even the personal convenience of car ownership, is simply too important and valuable to be banned. Religion has caused the deaths of millions of people, and the abuse of countless children, for millennia, yet presumably Exodus Cry have not launched a petition to ban religion. It could be argued that porn is not such an important or integral part of life as cars or religion, but the billions of men who visit porn sites every day might disagree. At least if they were honest. It would appear that more men, today, visit porn sites than own cars. And porn sites cause a lot less harm for the environment too.
Perhaps it’s because I’m not such as good a journalist as my fellow sex tech guide bloggers, but I tried to find the Change.org Exodus Cry petition and all I could find was the following, with less than 100 signatures, and created by a user named ‘JuicyNut’, who gives the following cogent reason for his objection to Pornhub :
Hello there, i want to ban porn hub because they are violating my very christian values and the right to keep my hands off my dick. Please ban them before more people fall for porn and start an endless cycle of fapping and falling into depression
