Three students from Concordia University, in Montreal (Canada), fans of seeing naked women as if it were a hobby, created the Pornhub platform in 2007 and later, in 2010, they sold the company to Fabian Thylmann, responsible for positioning this page among the most viewed in the world and to create an entire empire. The biggest algorithm in porn soon he was making hundreds of millions of dollars in profits a year, while racking up complaints about his malpractice.
Deep Down: The Story of Pornhub is the new Netflix documentary, which arrives on the platform this Wednesday with the aim of offering a glimpse of the birth of the most famous adult website on the Internet and, at the same time, asking questions about the moral and ethical limits in which the creation of pornographic content moves today and the challenges it faces today from discordant voices that, above all, seek a space for their freedom.
What is porn? This tape, an hour and a half long, starts with an innocent question to the different voices that participate, who are encouraged to remember the first times they saw pornographic content, the most extreme videos, what left them frozen. “If the answer is everything that has the ability to excite, the spectrum is as wide as one can imagine,” says one of the guests to speak in this documentary, which describes in a matter of seconds the limitless mixed bag that is Pornhub .
Rape, sexual relations with minors, assaults and other types of non-consensual encounters are mixed in the vast catalog without anyone stopping it
This film reviews the beginnings of Internet pornography, the way it was experienced when connections were slow, or the effects of pirated material. As happened with music or movies, people quickly got used to having free access was normalso Pornhub discovered a niche market with exponential profitability.
Like many other companies, Pornhub is also driven by a boundless hunger to expand its horizons and expand its profits, whatever the consequences. Thus, the limits within which a page designed to host content that arouses the public’s sexual desire moves blurs and illegal content soon appears. Rape, sexual relations with minors, assaults and other types of non-consensual encounters are mixed in the vast catalog without anyone stopping him.
As this documentary shows and collects Vozpopuli, the dividing line between good and evil was found in verification: if it was content that was not looking for direct profit, it did not require the identification of the subject who posted it, despite the fact that it could be downloaded by anyone and reproduced endlessly over and over again, even despite the protagonist’s opposition, or even despite being proof of a crime. Meanwhile, the company became the epicenter of adult content and his videos were hogging search engine results, with the consequent advertising entries.
Finally, the complaints came from associations such as the National Center for Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE, in its acronym in English) with campaigns that demanded the closure of the web for enriching itself at the expense of images that include rape, sexual abuse of minors and sex trafficking. On the other side, actors and other members of the adult content industry who defended having nothing to do with the illegal actions.
Pornhub: 30 moderators for infinite content
Journalist Nicholas Kristoff, from The New York Timessoon echoed the matter and in December 2020 he wrote Article The children of Pornhub. In that report, he alluded to the 3.5 billion monthly visits and the 3,000 million daily impressions of ads, as well as its impact as the 10th most visited page in the world, although full of violations that do not disappear even when their protagonists request it and that also monetizes the suffering of children.
As a result of that article, Mastercard and Visa stopped working with the platform, which decided to remove the unverified content. In addition, that report resulted in the appearance of some of its highest representatives in the Canadian Upper House in February 2021.
Moderators were required to review at least 700 videos a day and had to decide whether the woman on the screen was 14 or 19 years old.
One of the most delicate moments of this documentary comes when a former Pornhub worker, who is not seen in the image, admits that he was one of the 30 moderators, forced to review at least 700 videos a daya derisory figure if one takes into account that Facebook, a social network that is not intended to host pornographic content, has around 15,000 moderators.
As he tells it, they decided if the woman who appeared on the screen was 14 or 19 years old, in most cases without listening to the sound that could give them clues about the origin of the video, while a supervisor made the final decision in case of doubts. Many recordings went unnoticed or there was no time to check them all, while thousands of withdrawal requests took months to process.
whatIs porn free speech or a form of disguised sexual exploitation? The Netflix platform takes advantage of the history and controversies of Pornhub to join the debate on the abolition and dilemma of sex work, by giving a voice to some of the women and men who pay their mortgages and living expenses with a job that consider worthy.
As some workers in the industry point out, the decisions made on this adult website especially harmed porn stars, whose contents were included in the same bag as illegal materials. “There is no sex without consent. that is rape. There is no porn without consent. That is rape,” says a former Pornhub worker and leaves the eternal debate open.
