Although the internet is a fairly forbidden place, a set of rules of conduct prevail, and one of the most famous is articulated in this veteran meme known as “Rule 34”: “If something exists online, pornographic versions of it have already been made”. And at least until recently, most of them were available on Pornhub.
Founded in 2007, the adult content streaming platform has more than 76 million registered members monthly and the 112 million daily visits it receives make it one the 12th most visited website on the planet Tech giants like TikTok. It helped radically change the way pornography is created and distributed, and has made many people rich in the meantime.
But as someone warns at one point in the documentary To the Bottom: The Pornhub Story, “If you let someone upload content, all content will upload”. The film, which recently released on Netflix, sees the light to coincide with the announcement of Ethical Capital Partners’ acquisition of Mindgeek, the company that owns both the Canadian platform and other similar platforms – including YouPorn, Redtube and Brazzersa venture capital firm that claims to “seek investment opportunities in sectors that require ethical leadership.”
Algorithm geniuses
Like almost everything in the “streaming” world, Pornhub’s success can be explained by the algorithm. Its engineers pioneered the development of search optimization tools, ensuring that whenever someone “googled” their favorite fetish, the platform’s videos were at the top of the list of results. At the same time, the company developed a lucrative outlet for all those adult content creators who provided a legal and consensual service to customers who were willing to pay for it.
However, a 2020 article by New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof revealed that alongside this perfectly respectable material The platform hosted videos of rape and abuse of minors. Anyone could post content on Pornhub – only those who did so for profit needed to verify their identity – and it turns out that the company turned a blind eye to this illegal material because it generated more ad revenue. In the film, one of his former employees reveals that only around thirty people were dedicated to hosting the thousands of videos uploaded to the platform every day; Each of them had to check about 700, which made strict control of the content impossible.
Only after the news captured public opinion, and after that Visa and Mastercard will remove payment processing from Pornhub with a credit card – something that in any case harmed the verified professionals but did not help the victims of abuse – those responsible for the service began to clean up, removing millions of videos from the platform and boosting them security protocols. However, the reaction came too late. Complaints mounted in 2021, some from underage women, and in the summer of 2022 the visible minds of Mindgeek, Feras Antoon and David Tassilo, resigned from their posts.
Crusade Against Porn
In the fight against Pornhub, however, the line between heroes and villains isn’t as cleanly drawn as it first appears. As becomes clear in “Hasta el fondo”, the activists and lawyers who have been campaigning for the closure of the platform for years are not exactly – or not exclusively – acting in defense of the victims, but above all in the service of the victims Groups linked to the extreme right and the evangelical church as tools in the service of extremist religious groups whose aim is to remove everything even remotely sexual from public life and, of course, remove porn from the internet. “Trying to get pornography off the web is like ripping off someone’s spine.” says Noelle Perdue, ex-Pornhub writer, at one point in the documentary.
“There is an urgent need to abandon this discourse Sex work is bad and encourages violence‘ actress Gwen Adora points out in another scene of the film. “As sex workers, nobody really listens to us. Instead, they’re trying to ‘save’ us from pornography.” For her part, her colleague Siri Dahl adds to the campaign against the platform: “It’s not just an attack on pornography. It’s an assault on female sexuality, an assault on ‘queer’ sexuality, and an assault on people’s freedom of expression.” But perhaps the greatest truth contained in “Hasta el fondo” is summed up in a tweet published in the final bars of footage appear on screen: “If you think Pornhub is bad, you’re going to really hate the places people are going to visit when they do it. they close”.
