I worked at Pornhub – we had to watch 1,000 videos a day & guess girls' ages… viewers have no idea what they’re watching | The Sun
AT the height of its success Pornhub was the 10th most visited site in the world, attracting 3.5billion visits a month and raking in millions from almost three billion ad impressions a day.
But accusations that some content contained the rape and sexual exploitation of underage girls, and stolen footage, sparked a huge campaign against the site in 2020 – prompting Paypal, Mastercard and Visa to withdraw its business.
Forced to remove unverified content from the platform, and hit with multiple lawsuits, Pornhub took down 10 million videos, reducing the remaining total to 4million.
Now a new Netflix documentary, Money Shot: The Pornhub Story – out March 15 – looks at the rise and fall of the popular platform from both sides.
One of the most damning revelations comes during a conversation with an anonymous Pornhub moderator, who claims he was expected to watch 800-1000 videos in an eight hour shift at parent company MindGeek’s Cyprus office and would “guess” the ages of girls who featured in clips.
“We were scrubbing through the videos as fast as we could. Even if we thought we were being diligent we missed videos every now and then,” he says.
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“You can’t tell the age of somebody – they could be 14 or they could be 19. We would have to guess.”
The moderator, who worked at Pornhub for two years, also admits they often didn’t listen to the audio – which lawyer Dani Pinter, Senior Legal Counsel at The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), points out means “he wouldn’t hear if someone was screaming or saying ‘stop’”.
He adds: "I think the company could have done more to prevent certain things and only changed some things after it got in trouble."
Ms Pinter claims Pornhub was “knowingly profiting from sex trafficking".
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13“We’ve had 14-year-old girls saying, ‘I was raped and my rape has been on Pornhub for years. I’ve requested it be removed and no one has helped me. Not the police, not the website’,” she says.
“One survivor told us she went on a date with an older man, she was a minor. He drugged and raped her and the footage ended up on Pornhub.
“She requested they take it down and, when they didn’t, she came to us.
“Pornhub knows that there are sex traffickers creating content for their site or distributing child pornography on their site. For so long, no one has cared.”
In a statement issued in 2020, after a damning New York Times article, Pornhub's parent company MindGeek said: "We have zero tolerance for child sexual abuse materials (CSAM).
"Pornhub is unequivocally committed to combating CSAM, and has instituted an industry-leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate illegal material from our community."
While lawyers and campaigners argue the site did little to protect women and children from exploitation, sex workers claim they were unfairly targeted and had their income slashed overnight as a result of the Pornhub clampdown.
Speaking to The Sun, content creators Gwen Adora and Siri Dahl allege the #Traffickinghub campaign, which led to sweeping anti-porn laws in the US, actually made it harder to clamp down on exploitation.
“Treating porn the same way as non-consensual content, and taking down all the legal content that has been uploaded, makes it harder to help people who are experiencing violence,” says Gwen.
“In their efforts to abolish the porn industry, they’re not looking at solutions for helping survivors of abuse.”
Free-for-all
In its early days Pornhub, launched in 2007, was a blow to the lucrative porn industry, with users now able to get their kicks for free.
But its free-for-all nature, allowing anonymous users to upload anything, meant it was flooded with extreme footage, child sex abuse videos and stolen content.
For Siri, who entered the industry in 2012, the early site took money from the hands of performers.
“When I first started, there was no way for me to monetise my own content on Pornhub,” she says.
“As soon as I started investing a lot of my money into creating my own content, on my website, my videos started getting stolen and showing up on Pornhub.
“It became a frustrating game of whack-a-mole, having my lawyers issue takedown notices on a regular basis.”
Siri took five years away from the industry from 2015, but when she returned the site had a new section, ModelHub, where content creators could upload their own videos and subscribers would pay to view them.
“It 100 per cent changed my opinion of the platform because I had a way to monetise my content which automatically disincentivised people from uploading stolen clips and made copyright claims easier.”
She adds that the fan subscription site “was a complete game-changer” and says she no longer had to rely on income from porn films.
“It’s the reason I was able to buy a house,” she says.
Retail job 'more exploitative'
Gwen was persuaded to post on ModelHub in 2019, after being approached by another porn star at an industry Expo and told she could be the next Pornhub BBW (Big Beautiful Women) hit.
“There are not many places that we can promote or share our work because of bans on nudity on sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter,” she says.
“I thought this was a way to sell a lot of my content without needing to promote it because of the traffic that was going through Pornhub to the site.”
Both verified models, filming their own videos in the safety of their own room, the two women felt in control.
I've never felt more exploited than I did working in an office building or in retail, doing 10 hour shifts, being severely underpaid and treated poorly
“During my time away from the industry I moved out to the middle of nowhere and worked civilian jobs,” Siri recalls.
“I've never felt more exploited than I did working in an office building or in retail, doing 10 hour shifts, being severely underpaid and treated poorly.
“It made me appreciate this industry so much more because I'm definitely not being exploited. I chose this career twice now and have built a life for myself that I'm proud of.”
'Wild West'
But the Wild West nature of the main site soon led to disturbing posts, with titles using abusive language or tagging “teen” videos which featured girls who looked underage.
As performer Cherie Deville comments in the programme: “If you let just anyone upload anything, you’re going to get anyone uploading anything – and that's not OK.”
Noelle Purdue, who worked at MindGeek for three years, said the fact that accounts did not have to be verified made illegal content impossible to trace back to the poster.
“Many people within the site and many performers have been advocating for mandatory verification for years and generally the response was ‘we’re working on it, it’s happening eventually’,” she reveals.
“That was said throughout my time there. The vast majority of Pornhub’s content was unverified.”
Naked video at 14
Amid growing controversy over the disturbing videos on the site, American campaigners launched the #traffickinghub movement and began publishing evidence of content featuring rape victims as young as 12.
She accused company directors of being complicit in the rape and trafficking of women and young girls and claimed she had spoken to one young victim whose sexual abuse was viewed by over 2million users.
She also crowdfunded an advert saying the site was profiting from rape, child abuse and sex trafficking and launched a petition to shut the site down, which was signed by over 2million.
The campaign led to a powerful article in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristoff, called The Children of Pornhub, which presented evidence from victims including Serena Fleites, who was 14 when an explicit video of her was uploaded in 2014.
She later sued the site and Visa.
“Her story was just devastating,” Kristoff tells the documentary. "She had a crush on a boy who was much older. He asked her for a naked video, and she sent one… Then kids started looking at her and smirking.
"Somebody put those videos on Pornhub. One of them had 400,000 views.
“She asked Pornhub to remove them. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t, but if they did someone would immediately upload them again and Pornhub made money off this.”
Arson attack
When Mastercard and Visa cut ties with the site in December 2020, making it difficult for account holders to pay, Pornhub took down all videos posted by unverified users, reducing the content from 13 million to 4 million.
In the backlash against MindGeek, a £16million mansion being built by its CEO Feras Antoon in Montreal was burnt to the ground in a suspected arson attack in 2021.
Gwen and fellow Pornhub advocator Asa Akira were caught in the crossfire of one lawsuit, launched in July 2021, which accused the company of "racketeering" and served papers on the women for being "agents of Mindgeek" paid to spread its "disinformation".
Gwen dismisses the allegation as "bulls***. Nothing but lies".
Both she and Siri say religious fanatics and "moral panic" were behind the campaign, and the agenda was not to stop abuse, but to ban all porn.
They claim ModelHub was a casualty and 72 per cent of performers lost significant income.
“ModelHub, where verified models were selling their videos, got taken down in December 2020 and our income from that just got completely cut off," she says.
“We're still unable to actually make money from our paid content, which is bad.”
Siri claims the campaigners deliberately rallied against legal porn and that strict laws passed by the US government to make online platforms culpable for “assisting or facilitating sex trafficking” have made promoting her content impossible.
“The conflation of porn and exploitation by NCOSE and the campaigners isn't accidental,” she says.
“It's a very predictable result of campaigns which aim to generate fear that all porn is visual evidence of the people on camera being sexually exploited.
“I think that’s harmful because it's contributing to the stigma that sex workers face.”
She adds: “I think twice about posting a picture of me in a bikini on my Instagram account, even if it’s not a sexy pose. Because I'm a sex worker, that could get flagged as soliciting.”
Noelle, who now calls herself a “porn historian”, believes Pornhub and other sites should do more to prevent exploitative material being posted online, but says the porn industry is not to blame for the vile videos of abuse.
“The direct conflation of sex trafficking and exploitation with porn harms everybody,” she says.
“It harms people who are looking to consume porn in a healthy way, and it opens up the possibility for porn to be non-consensual, which should not be the case.
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“In order for it to be pornography, it as to be consensual, otherwise it is documentation of sexual abuse. There is no such thing as non-consensual pornography. It is rape.”
Money Shot: The Pornhub Story will air on Netflix on March 15
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