Money finally talked loud enough.
It took reams of signatures, plus being dropped by both Mastercard and Visa after investigations, to get Pornhub to delete unverified videos uploaded by site users.
As of Monday, the porn site’s content had decreased by 10 million videos, from 13.5 million on Sunday night, to 2.9 million by the next morning, Vice’s Motherboard reported.
The move stems from a New York Times report about the thousands if not millions of abusive videos, including child porn, rape and content posted without the consent of those appearing in them, that persist online.
Pornhub has purged any videos that can’t be verified, meaning regular users can’t upload videos. Going forward, the platform will only accept videos from official content partners or members of its model program, which requires those who sign up to verify their age.
“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 said in a statement on its blog, according to Motherboard. “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.”
Monday’s move followed last Tuesday’s announcement by Pornhub, which said it would only let verified users upload material, according to The Verge. That stopped the uploads. Now existing downloads have been deleted.
Starting next year, Pornhub will begin a verification and review process, Motherboard said, a departure from the previous policy of letting anyone create an account and upload videos, much as is done on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms. Pornhub was launched in 2007.
