A Pornhub moderator has shed light on how many videos they were tasked with going through per shift, and why inappropriate or abusive content could have been missed.
Money Shot: The Pornhub Story explores the controversial porn website and how the infamous adult entertainment platform ‘fundamentally changed how pornography is made and distributed’.
As Netflix explains in their synopsis of the film, after launching in 2007, Pornhub ‘enabled erotic content creators to reach a massive audience while the company made billions of dollars.’
However, at the same time it also became embroiled in allegations including non-consensual material and trafficking on the site.
The film will also explore how anti-trafficking organisations have sought justice for victims, as well as if the online giant can, or wants to, protect the people from who they profit.
An anonymous former Pornhub moderator shares in the documentary: ‘I think the company could have done more to prevent certain things and chose not to, and only really changed some things after it got in trouble.’
The former employee, who worked for the company for two years, said some of the moderating occurred in Canada, while most of it happened in Cyprus.
At the time they worked there, there were 30 moderators.
‘Every moderator had to review 700 videos per day but it was expected for us to do more.’
Senior legal counsel of non-profit organisation National Center on Sexual Exploitation Dani Pinter goes on to explain: ‘Each of these moderators were tasked with viewing 800 to 1000 videos per 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.’
The whistleblower continues: ‘We were scrubbing through videos as fast as we could.
‘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.’
Elsewhere, it is revealed by the whistleblower that there was a backlog of ‘six to eight months’ of videos that were requested to be taken down.
‘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.’
No stranger to controversy, in the past six months, Pornhub has had its YouTube, Instagram and TikTok accounts shut down for violating the social media sites’ policies.
It came after the site’s parent company MindGeek was sued by several people who alleged it had profited by distributing child pornography and non-consensual sexual videos.
However, MindGeek has said the allegations lack merit and that it has ‘instituted the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history’.
Money Shot: The Pornhub Story is streaming from March 15 on Netflix.
Got a story?
If you’ve got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us [email protected], calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we’d love to hear from you.
Source: Read Full Article