The Pornhub Story Is At Least Half A Dozen Public Policy Debates At Once

Photo by Shane uchi on Unsplash

A brief summary of the Pornhub stury so far:

1. Pornhub started off December with a fairly decent reputation, as far as porn sites go.
2. Then the New York Times published a story on December 4th accusing the site of being “infested with rape videos” and of making money off “child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.”
3. Following a push by evangelical group Exodus Cry, among others, Visa and MasterCard shut down payments to Pornhub.
4. Pornhub have since removed everything on the site that was uploaded by an unverified user, which turned out to be about three-quarters of the site’s content.

All of this has happened in the space of about two weeks, and even independent of the effect of these changes on the victims of Pornhub’s approach to illegal content and sexual assault, it’s generated at least half a dozen major questions of public policy.

1. Is this, along with the corrosive effect of the Trump administration’s assault on reality, the breaking point for the principle that websites cannot be held liable for content generated by users?
2. Is the involvement of Exodus Cry a once-off, or a part of something larger — and if the latter, should we be concerned that a religious organisation is pushing policy decisions by major corporations in such a manner?
3. Should Visa and MasterCard between them be able to effectively prevent organisations, however objectionable, from receiving payments? Are we happy as a society to allow private organisations to exercise that degree of power to their own ends?
4. Given that Pornhub was also a means to earn a living for a number of performers until this week, what happens to those performers and their livelihoods? Who, if anyone, bears responsibility for the fact that they have probably lost their means of earning a living?
5. If only verified users will be able to upload content in the future, how will users be verified — particularly given that some content producers may be covertly operating in countries where producing porn is a criminal offence?
6. In the event that other porn streaming sites follow suit, what happens to people’s perception of how sex should look and feel when amateur porn disappears and the only porn available is professional in nature and designed to appeal to the camera?

There’s no one route to take that provides a satisfactory answer to all of these questions. These are debates which will continue for years to come, both in terms specific to Pornhub, and in broader across-the-internet terms. What feels like the right answer on one doesn’t necessarily match what feels like the right answer on another.