Pornhub is one of the most popular websites on Earth. It’s also ‘infested with rape videos’, writes Nicholas Kristof for The New York Times.
It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.
Pornhub isn’t the only site being used to spread this kind of illicit content.
Facebook removed 12.4 million images related to child exploitation in a three-month period this year. Twitter closed 264,000 accounts in six months last year for engaging in sexual exploitation of children.
Kristof struggles to offer a solution to this gargantuan problem. He argues that ‘The issue is not pornography but rape’, but worries that increasingly strict content moderation may result in ‘the most offensive material…mov[ing] to the dark web or to websites in less regulated countries.’
The article concludes with three recommendations:
- Allow only verified users to post videos
- Prohibit downloads
- Increase moderation
The first and last recommendation may help, but prohibiting downloads does not seem feasible.
Earlier in the article, Kristof states that ‘Unlike YouTube, Pornhub allows…videos to be downloaded directly from its website.’ He appears unaware that it is actually very easy to download YouTube videos. There are plugins that can enable users to download them. There are also sites that, when supplied with a YouTube URL, can produce a video download link.
Even if these options were somehow prohibited, people streaming video can always use screen capture software to record what they are seeing.
For more on this admittedly depressing topic, check out episode 213 of the Making Sense podcast featuring New York Times’ editor, Gabriel J.X. Dance.
They discuss how misleading the concept of “child pornography” is, the failure of governments and tech companies to grapple with the problem, the tradeoff between online privacy and protecting children, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, photo DNA, the roles played by specific tech companies, the ethics of encryption, “sextortion,” the culture of pedophiles, and other topics.
