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February 6, 2020 04:41 pm

A Months-Long Investigation Reveals Pornhub's Terrible Moderation Practices

samleecole shares a report: On May 1, 2016, in the middle of final exams, a young woman got a text message that would change her life forever. It included a screenshot of a pornographic video posted online, featuring her. Panicking, she quickly tried to justify what she had done. "They said it would only be in Australia," she told her friend, according to court documents. "I only did it for money." The video spread like wildfire. Jane Doe 11 -- one of 22 women who sued porn production company Girls Do Porn in 2016 for coercing them to have sex on video and lying to them about how the videos would be distributed -- learned from the student council president that "everyone was watching it in the library, so much so that the internet essentially crashed." In October 2019, after Michael Pratt was charged with federal sex trafficking crimes, Pornhub removed Girls Do Porn's official Pornhub channel, as well as pages promoting Girls Do Porn as "top shelf" content and a reason to pay Pornhub a subscription fee. In January, after the ruling in the civil case found Girls Do Porn owed 22 women a total of $13 million, the official GirlsDoPorn.com site was taken offline. But even with the official site shut down and its owners in jail or on the run, the ruling has done little to stop the spread of the videos online. Pornhub claims that victims of nonconsensual porn -- as many of the Girls Do Porn videos are -- can easily request to remove videos from the site, and that those videos can be "fingerprinted." Broadly speaking, video fingerprinting is a method for software to identify, extract, and then summarize characteristic components or metadata of a video, allowing that video to be uniquely identified by its "fingerprint." According to Pornhub, this would automatically prevent future attempts to upload a video that was flagged. But a Motherboard investigation found that this system can be easily and quickly circumvented with minor editing. Pornhub's current method for removing Girls Do Porn videos and other forms of non-consensual porn not only puts the onus of finding and flagging videos almost entirely on potentially-traumatized victims -- those victims can't even rely on the system to work.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/pfvjtfn2JMM/a-months-long-investigation-reveals-pornhubs-terrible-moderation-practices

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