Adult entertainment and pornography platform Pornhub has removed more than half of all its content in an operation that aims to prevent illegal content from being spread. To avoid this, the site began to require, yesterday Monday, a verification of all users who publish on the web.
In just 24 hours, the number of videos hosted on the portal, a leader in adult content, went from more than 13 million to just close to 3 million after applying a series of measures proposed by an article in “The New York Times” that prompted Mastercard and Visa to block payments with their cards on the Pornhub domain.
In an opinion piece, the journalist Nicholas Kristof echoed several cases of sexual exploitation, abuse and rape on this platform that attracts 3.5 billion visits per month. «The page is infested with rape videos.
It monetizes rape of children, revenge porn, videos recorded without consent in women’s showers, racist and misogynistic content and scenes of women being suffocated with plastic bags, “said the journalist in that article, which seems to have stirred the conscience of both financial services.
As a solution, Pornhub will only allow verified users, whose identity and age is legally accredited, to upload content to the platform. Also, it appears that your employees will review each of the videos before they are available .
“This means that every piece of content hosted on Pornhub comes from verified providers, a requirement that platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have not yet established,” the company said on its blog.
The rest of the videos that did not meet that condition – the vast majority – are no longer accessible and are marked with the label “pending verification and review”, something that will be done throughout 2021.
Hasta ahora, como en la mayoría de redes sociales, cualquier usuario (anónimo o identificado) podía subir todo tipo de contenido a la plataforma. Un problema constante que da lugar a situaciones de ciberacoso y amenazas pero que en el caso de Pornhub era aún más sensible por tratarse de contenidos pornográficos. De momento, otras plataformas de la competencia como Redtube, Youporn o XTube no han anunciado medidas similares.