Pornhub’s Nuclear Reaction Necessary Thanks to Lackluster Moderation
By: Carter Gibson
Tags: Moderation, Content Strategy, Community Management, Community

Pornhub just nuked millions of pieces of content from its site without warning. All content uploaded by an unverified profile was removed.

This followed after Visa and Mastercard refused to process payments for the company after a whole bunch of illegal (and disgusting) content was discovered on the site. The only videos allowed on the site today and going forward are from verified profiles — including both professional companies and amateurs. Pardon the play on words, but damn Pornhub, that was ballsy.

And necessary because of Pornhub’s lackluster moderation.

Putting aside any hot takes about how much power credit card companies should have and their ability to influence free speech, Pornhub got itself into this mess thanks to its inadequate moderation programs. The steps the company took to remove the illegal and harmful content doesn’t absolve the company of the societal harm it caused by not acting quicker, but the fresh start shows a vision of verified content uploading more platforms should emulate. From this debacle, Pornhub’s newly introduced moderation policies put the company at the forefront of social networks who are willing to do what it takes to keep communities healthy — if they can enforce them, and even if it was way past due.

What happened?

Moderation for a site that hosts salacious content is an extremely difficult task. Not only is automatic moderation difficult and the lives of human moderators in these roles emotionally taxing, users would probably prefer fewer rules to explore their… interests.

Sometimes those interests are relatively benign. Long a destination for bootlegged premium content that sites probably wished people paid for instead, Pornhub drove traffic to its site with the full understanding that lots of its most popular content was often uploaded by people who didn’t have the rights to do so. They, in large part, turned a blind eye to this. While they did allow content owners to report content that shouldn’t have been uploaded, this is arduous game of Whack-A-Mole. And besides, many just uploaded content as private and bypassed the whole system.

Other times those “interests” cross the line in much more serious ways. I won’t get into the particular content Visa / Mastercard were upset about, but it was bad. Really bad. While some of this content was, indeed, moderated, it appeared to be too big a challenge for Pornhub to tackle and too much of that content stayed up for their payment processor’s liking. The harm not removing this content caused to actual humans is very, very real. (sidebar rant: this is true of other social platforms too, and they all need to do better.) Pornhub’s failure to moderate neglected its responsibility to host the kind of content it does.

It’s also gotta be said that Pornhub is taking this step because it was forced to. It also conveniently comes at a time when Pornhub has been pushing its premium subscription and expanding its catalog of professional partners. Would Pornhub have cared this much about moderation if they hadn’t lost their daily paycheck? Were they more willing to take such a drastic step because they had lucrative features to compete with Onlyfans?

It’s a moot point, but I think the answer is definitively that it would have taken longer. And that bums me out.

Ultimately, this nuclear option is a hard reset for the platform. It was functionally impossible for them to manually review every piece of existing content because of how long they hadn’t moderated aggressively enough. The corpus was too big. So, they hit the reboot button. There was no other way. But Pornhub didn’t need to get into this position. They prioritized growth over healthy growth and now they’re paying the price in reputational harm.

Now what?

I wrote just a few weeks ago about how disappointed I was that Twitter’s updated verification policy remains exclusively for notable people. When I saw that verification was getting an overhaul, I immediately dreamt of a world where verified equated to “is real person.” Unexpectedly, it’s Pornhub that’s doing it first. Does that… now make it one of the most responsible social networks out there? Pornhub is certainly trying to spin it that way:

Truthfully, circumstances aside, I think they have a point.

Verified profiles being given better contribution options and ranking placement above unverified profiles is a smart way to combat abuse. (Tinder does it.) While I certainly think that there’s a place for anonymity online, users should be able to choose who they participate with and it should be easier for them to know who to trust. Pornhub’s lack of moderation in the past may have made a future with both verified and unverified content impossible, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t work for other places. Imagine a ‘Verified People Only’ filter. I’m still looking at you Twitter…

In addition to only allowing uploads from verified users, Pornhub has launched new community guidelines with some extremely strict policies (NSFW, links to help.pornhub)— including that content is suspended the moment it’s reported and only cleared once reviewed. There’s absolutely the possibility for legit content to get penalized under this rule, but that’s a minor concern in the grand scheme of the kinf content they’re trying to prevent.

Additionally, they’ve launched a Trusted Flagger which is something I’d like to see more companies employ:

Time will tell how well Pornhub will be able to enforce this stuff, but it’s certainly true that it’s much, much easier with less content. It’s also true that these measures are well above and beyond what we’re seeing elsewhere. I can’t believe that I’m writing an article about Pornhub, and I’m even more surprised that it’s now, somehow, an exemplar for strong content moderation after where it was earlier this week.

Stopping illegal activity is obviously a win for society, but the nuke of unofficial content might also be a win for Pornhub’s community as well. From the reactions I’m seeing on Twitter to the announcement, it looks like existing verified users feel supported. In addition to that, removing the unofficial content gives a boon for their community of amateur creators: less competition and more views. More important though is safety. Ultimately, people will only participate where they feel safe — especially if they’re participating as their actual, verified selves.

— — —

All communities fail at a certain scale without the appropriate community investments.

The requirements are different across platforms, but all communities will fail when they get to a certain size if they haven’t invested in the right stuff. Platforms may be able to become huge before that happens, but eventually something’s gotta give. As platforms grow, any one individual user may not be any worse than another, but it creates more opportunities for failure in front of more eyes. Companies can either proactively handle it — ideally as early as possible — or they can react to the consequences.

The cynical way to think about all this is that companies consider growth an “the ends justify the means” situation. In Pornhub’s case, maybe they were preparing for this all along and were expecting it. Maybe they thought the growth was worth it, despite how morally reprehensible as the content was. Outta sight, outta mind? Eye on the prize? Maybe this is just how too many social companies are. Maybe the consequences aren’t severe enough and the profits too large for anything to meaningfully change.

The optimistic outlook — and the one that I’m taking — is that this was a preventable outcome with known solutions. Community management and trust and safety, especially in 2020, are both really getting its time in the limelight. Perhaps in celebrating the steps companies take, we can show other professionals that these problems are manageable. With smarter moderation, Pornhub could have still secured its growth and dominance without having to delete most of its corpus in the process. Their consequence heavy deterrent for other companies watching from the sidelines. This extreme example of content moderation gone wrong is a lesson to all platforms. The goalposts are different everywhere, sure, but the fact is that moderation sets and enforces the expectations that keep platforms around.

What happened — and is happening— to Pornhub is a fascinating example of the harm that can be caused to both companies and users when platforms don’t moderate. It works for a while and gets you fast growth until it… doesn’t. The trick is to invest early. Start with unscalable solutions that set appropriate expectations. Don’t wait for perfect, scalable solutions and let bad behaviors solidify.

Don’t. Wait.