Pornhub, child sexual abuse materials and anti-pornography campaigning

ABSTRACT

This article uses the case study of Nicholas Kristof’s 2020 New York Times article attacking Pornhub for (among other claims) hosting child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) as a way to consider both the real harms caused by Pornhub and the ways in which anti-porn discourses such as Kristof’s distract public debates and policymakers from those harms. While Kristof writes about the challenge that Pornhub faces in trying to remove CSAM from a user-generated site, he ignores the fact that all social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter, face the same challenges. He thus makes it appear that this is a problem of pornography rather than a problem of scalable content moderation in a user-generated digital content ecosystem. At the same time, he ignores the real damage that Pornhub’s piracy-based business model has done to sex work industries and sex workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Pornhub
• digital pornography
• anti-pornography activism
• piracy
• child sexual abuse materials

Acknowledgements

The authors extend profound gratitude to the referees whose informed, generous and detailed comments on an earlier version of the article have greatly improved the final version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.