Pornhub has purged a vast amount of unverified content as the pornography website faces increased scrutiny over allegations that it allows sexual exploitation.
- Pornhub appears to have purged a vast amount of unverified content as the pornography website faces increased scrutiny over allegations that it allows sexual exploitation.
- The pornography website had about 13.5 million videos before it began purging Sunday evening, according to Vox.
- The Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed that the Pornhub search bar offers 2,913,964 videos as of Monday evening.
Pornhub is purging millions of unverified videos as the pornography website faces increased scrutiny over allegations that it allows sexual exploitation.
Both Visa and Mastercard told the Daily Caller News Foundation Thursday that they are not allowing their cards to be used on Pornhub after opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof accused Pornhub of monetizing “child rapes, revenge pornography, spycam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content” and more. (RELATED: Hawley, Lawmakers Introduce Bills Allowing Victims To Sue Pornhub, Perpetrators)
Following the announcements from the credit card companies, Pornhub began removing videos Sunday evening that were not uploaded by the site’s official partners or members of the site’s programs, Vox reported Monday. The pornography website had about 13.5 million videos before it began purging, the publication reported, and many of these videos were from unverified accounts.
A Pornhub spokesman declined to tell the Daily Caller News Foundation how many videos the website had removed, but noted that the “current number of videos can be seen in the search bar on our homepage.”
The DCNF confirmed that the Pornhub search bar offers 2,913,964 videos as of Monday evening, meaning that Pornhub appears to have removed over 78% of its videos since Sunday evening.
Screenshot, Pornhub.
The website had only 4.7 million videos as of Monday morning, Vox reported, and the most-viewed non-verified video made by an amateur (which had over 29 million views) had also been removed.
“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 announced. “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.”
The popular pornography website has been listed as the 10th-most-visited website in the world, with 3.5 billion visits a month and profits from almost three billion ad impressions every day, according to Kristof. Before Pornhub began purging content, anyone who created a Pornhub account could upload videos to the site since it first launched in 2017, according to Vox.
“Pornhub’s removal of millions of videos by unverified users is a huge deal, for most of the horrible videos I saw were in this category,” Kristof tweeted Monday. “Pressure should be also applied on XVideos, which has a bigger audience and less monitoring. Pressure has to be evenly applied to be effective.”
Kristof’s story sparked a backlash against Pornhub, prompting lawmakers like Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse to call for investigations into the pornography website. (RELATED: Sasse Demands Full Investigation After Pornhub Rapidly Changes Policies Over Allegations Of Child Sexual Exploitation)
“Just the other day Pornhub was insisting that it didn’t have a problem with rape and assault videos, and that its ‘vast team of human moderators’ was magically capable of working around the clock to review the 2.8 hours of video that were uploaded to the site every minute,” Sasse said in a statement to the DCNF after Pornhub announced that it would implement changes.
“Today, they’re doing a complete 180 by changing their policies,” Sasse added. “These new changes underscore the need for a full DOJ investigation.”
Source: Pornhub Purges Over 10 Million Videos | The Daily Caller
