Pornhub's video purge poses a legal riddle
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Pornhub's removal of as many as 10 million videos Monday — a content-removal earthquake on a scale the web has rarely seen before — sent tremors through a tech industry built on user-generated content.
Driving the news: Following a New York Times expose of underage and nonconsensual content on Pornhub, Mastercard and Visa stopped providing service to the site.
What's happening: Pornhub built a vast adult library by opening its platforms to uploads from anyone, but now it's removing all videos except those from verified users — commercial partners or participants in its model program.
By the numbers: On Wednesday the site reported a total of under 3 million videos — down from a pre-takedown tally of 13.5 million videos (per Motherboard).
Between the lines: Some observers saw the porn platform's new restriction as a harbinger of how the web might change if Congress, as it has threatened, removes a key liability protection for online platforms, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
- Every major online platform — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and beyond — is built on a foundation of material posted by the public.
- "If you wonder what the internet would be like without Section 230, Pornhub’s response to losing its payment processors offers a pretty good preview. 'Verified' content only; everything else disappears," tweeted Platformer's Casey Newton.
Yes, but: Section 230 resolved an ambiguity in the law by letting platforms moderate their content without assuming the liabilities of being a "publisher" of that material.
- It protects platforms from civil suits but not from criminal prosecution.
- It doesn't say anything about user verification.
Other legal experts argue that without 230, a company like Pornhub might choose to police its content as little as possible, in order to more credibly claim a role as a conduit for content belonging to others rather than a publisher.
Pornhub also faces a lawsuit involving 40 plaintiffs who say the service hosted nonconsensual videos of them that originated on the GirlsDoPorn site. GirlsDoPorn shut down after it was fined $13 million in January.
- The new case could test whether Section 230 still applies in this situation, per ArsTechnica. A 2018 law known as SESTA/FOSTA carves out an exception in Section 230 for offenses involving sex trafficking.
