A trial program conducted by Pornhub in collaboration with UK-based child protection organizations aimed to deter users from searching for child abuse material (CSAM) on its website. Whenever CSAM-related terms were searched, a warning message and a chatbot appeared, directing users to support services. The trial reported a significant reduction in CSAM searches and an increase in users seeking help. Despite some limitations in data and complexity, the chatbot showed promise in deterring illegal behavior online. While the trial has ended, the chatbot and warnings remain active on Pornhub’s UK site, with hopes for similar measures across other platforms to create a safer internet environment.
Did it? Or did it make them look elsewhere?
The amount of school uniform, braces, pigtails and step-sister porn on Pornhub makes me think they want the nonces to watch.
given the amount of extremely edgy content already on Pornhub, this is kinda sus
Yeah…i am honestly curious what these search terms were, how many of those were ACTUALLY looking for CP. And of those…how many are now flagged somewhow?
I know I got the warning when I searched for young gymnast or something like that cuz I was trying to find a specific video I had seen before. False positives can be annoying, but that’s the only time I’ve ever encountered it.
Google does this too, my wife was searching for “slutty schoolgirl” costumes and Google was like “have a seat ma’am”
Google now gives you links to rehabs and addiction recovery centers when searching for harm reduction information about non-addictive drugs.
Big tech is teaching us about morality.
I do have to agree with them on that one. Fetishizing school uniforms worn by children gives some serious Steven Tyler vibes.
Sexuality is tightly connected to societal taboos, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult - it’s no-one else businesses. There is no need or benefit in moralizing peoples sexuality.
It’s still weird to sexualize children. It’s less weird when it’s teenagers and everyone is of age but it’s a weird thing to engage in constantly.
Imagine a porn site telling you to seek help because you’re a filthy pervert. Thats gotta push some to get some help I’d think.
Imagine how dumb, in addition to deranged, these people would have to be to look for child porn on a basically legitimate website. Misleading headline too, it didn’t stop anything, it just told them “Not here”
IIRC Xhamster started doing this a few years ago, minus the AI chatbot.
Didn’t they just block certain search terms (which actually made the site somewhat difficult to use for legitimate/legal content)?
The ol’ Scunthorpe problem.
4.4 million sounds a bit excessive. Facebook marketplace intercepted my search for “unwanted gift” once and insisted I seek help. These things have a lot of false positives.
Found one of the guys who spoke to the bot
The original report from the researchers can be found here: https://www.iwf.org.uk/about-us/why-we-exist/our-research/rethink-chatbot-evaluation/ Researchers said:
The chatbot was displayed 2.8 million times between March 2022 and August 2023, resulting in 1,656 requests for more information and Stop It Now services; and 490 click-throughs to the Stop It Now website.
So from 4.4 million banned queries, only 2.8 million (between the date interval in the quote above) and only 490 clicks to seek help. Ngl, kinda underwhelming. And I also think, given the amount of extremely edgy content already on Pornhub, this is kinda sus.
It’s not really that underwhelming. Disclaimer: I don’t condone child abuse. I find it abhorrent, and I will never justify it.
People have fantasies, though. If a dude searches for “burglar breaks in and has sex with milf,” does that mean that he wants to do this in real life? Of course not (or god I hope not!) So, some people may have searched for “dad has sex with young babysitter” and bam! Bot! Some people have a fetish for diapers - there are tons of porn of adults wearing diapers and having sex. Not my thing, but who am I to judge? So again, someone searches “sex with diapers” and bam! Bot!
Let’s not forget that as much as pornhub displays a sign saying “Hey, are you 18?” a lot of people will lie. And those young folks will also search for stupid things.
So I don’t think that aaaaaall 1+ million searches were done by people with actual pedophilia.
The fact that 1,600 people decided to click and inform themselves, in the UK alone, well, that’s a lot, in my opinion, and it should be something to commend, not to just say “eh. Underwhelming.”
Thanks. I looked for it but was too stupid to find it.
Sounds like a good feature. Anything that stops people from doing that is great.
But I do have to wonder… were people really expecting to find that content on PornHub? That site certainly seems legit enough that I doubt they’d have that stuff on there. I’d imagine most actual content would be on the dark web and specialty groups, not on PH.
PH had a pretty big problem with CSAM a few years ago, they ended up wiping ~2/3rds of their user submitted content to try fix it. (Note, they wiped all non-verified user submitted videos, not all of it was CSAM).
And im guessing they are trying to catch users who are trending towards questionable material. “College”✅ -> “Teen”⚠️ -> “Young Teen”⚠️⚠️⚠️ -> "CSAM"🚔 etc.
Wow, that bad? I was aware they purged a lot of ‘amateur’ content over concerns regarding consent to upload/revenge porn, but I didn’t know it was that much.
Yeah, unverified user content had a lot of problems. Also piracy and gore etc.
The purge appears to have hit almost 9 million of the 13.5 million videos on Pornhub as of Sunday, or nearly two-thirds of all the content hosted on the site.
Eeeeeeeh. There’s nuance.
IIRC there were only a handful of verified CSAM videos on the entire website. It’s inevitable, it happens everywhere with UGC, including on here. Anecdotally, in the years leading up to the purge PH had already cleaned up its act and from what I saw pirated content was rather well moderated. However this time the media made a huge stink about the alleged CSAM, payment processors threatened to pull out (they are notoriously very puritan, it’s caused a lot of trouble to lemmynsfw’s admins for instance) and so regardless of the validity of the initial claims PH had to do something to gain back the trust of payment processors, so they basically nuked every video that did not have a government ID attached.
Now if I may speculate a little, one of the reasons it happened this way is probably that due to its industry position PH is way better moderated than most (if not all) websites of their size and already had verified a bunch of its creators. At the same time the rise of OnlyFans and similar websites means that real amateur content has all but disappeared so there was less and less reason to allow random UGC anyway. So the high moderation costs probably didn’t make much sense anymore anyway.
Spot on. The availability of CSAM was overblown by a well funded special interest group (Exodus Cry). The articles about it were pretty much ghost written by them.
When you’re the biggest company in porn you’ve got a target on your back. In my opinion they removed all user content to avoid even the appearance of supporting CSAM, not because they were guilty of anything.
PornHub has been very open about normalizing healthy sexuality for years, while also providing interesting data access for both scientists and the general public.
“Exodus Cry is an American Christian non-profit advocacy organization seeking the abolition of the legal commercial sex industry, including pornography, strip clubs, and sex work, as well as illegal sex trafficking.[2] It has been described by the New York Daily News,[3] TheWrap,[4] and others as anti-LGBT, with ties to the anti-abortion movement.[5]”
They’re the fuckers who almost turned OF into Pinterest as well? Not surprising in retrospect. The crazy thing is how all news outlets ran with the narrative and payment processors are so flaky with adult content. De-platforming sex work shouldn’t be this easy.
