A Pornhub moderator has revealed how many videos they were assigned to watch every shift and why improper or offensive content may have been overlooked.
Money Shot: The Pornhub Story delves into the contentious porn website and how the iconic adult entertainment platform’fundamentally transformed how pornography is manufactured and disseminated.
According to Netflix’s summary of the film, Pornhub “allowed sexual content makers to access a vast audience while the firm reaped billions of dollars” following its introduction in 2007.
At the same time, it got entangled in claims of non-consensual content and trafficking on the site.
The film will also look at how anti-trafficking organisations have sought justice for victims, as well as whether or not the internet behemoth can or wants to safeguard the individuals from whom it profits.
In the documentary, one unnamed former Pornhub moderator says, ‘I think the firm could have done more to avoid some things and decided not to, and only truly altered some things after it got in trouble.’
According to the former employee, who worked for the firm for two years, some of the moderating took place in Canada, but the majority took place in Cyprus.
There were 30 moderators at the time they worked there.
‘Every moderator had to review 700 videos per day but it was expected for us to do more.’
Dani Pinter, senior legal counsel at the non-profit National Center on Sexual Exploitation, goes on to explain: ‘Each of these moderators was entrusted with examining 800 to 1000 movies every eight-hour shift.
‘And that’s impossible. So of course they were fast-forwarding, skipping through, no sound, which is key because sometimes the women or children in the video are crying, yelling, saying No, or saying Stop, and they’re not catching any of that.’ any of it.’
‘We were scrubbing through footage as rapidly as we could,’ the whistleblower says.
‘Even if we thought that we were being diligent with our work, we would still miss a few videos every now and then.’
They add: ‘I can’t really tell from a video the age of somebody. It’s a really hard thing to determine if a 17-year-old is more than 18. They could be 14 or they could be 19. Basically we would just guess.
‘Then my manager would decide if the video would be taken down for good or if it will go live again.
‘The rules constantly changed.’
‘They proudly boasted that every single video was reviewed, but to put it into perspective Pornhub has traffic similar to these big social media websites, ninth most-trafficked website in the world, conservatively,’ Pinter says.
‘Facebook had 15,000 moderators, and that was for a site that isn’t primarily centered around sexually explicit content, and they still have 15,000 moderators who we find out, are very overwhelmed.’
The whistleblower also said that there was a backlog of’six to eight months’ of videos that were ordered to be removed.
‘We don’t really go through them in time,’ they said, recalling the ‘thousands’ of requests.
‘Many videos that should have been taken down stayed up for months.’
Pornhub is no stranger to controversy, having had its YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok accounts taken down in the last six months for breaching the social media sites’ standards.
That happened after MindGeek, the site’s parent firm, was sued by multiple persons who claimed it benefited from the distribution of child pornography and non-consensual sexual films.
Nevertheless, MindGeek has maintained the charges lack validity and that it has ‘instituted the most complete protections in user-generated platform history’.
Money Shot: The Pornhub Story is streaming from March 15 on Netflix.
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