Pornhub staff admits on secret videos underage content: ‘They could be 16’

Senior employees at MindGeek, the parent company of popular pornography site Pornhub, were caught on video admitting that moderation protocols for underage content were not taken “seriously” before 2020.

The employees, who were secretly recorded by journalists at Sound Investigations, explained how Pornhub still has no way of knowing whether someone in a video was underage and that they could easily slip through the cracks with a “fake ID.”

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“We don’t know who that is, we don’t have consent of that person, and we’re running ads. As a business, we’re monetizing content that we don’t know where this comes from, we don’t know who’s on that video, we don’t know the age of the person on the video,” a man identified as Mike Farley, MindGeek technical product manager, said in the video. “They look 20, they could be 16, you know? How do you know the difference between a 20-year-old and a 16-year-old nowadays?”

“No one gave a s***,” Farley continued, explaining that content moderators for the site would skim through videos for “murder videos” or “snuff films,” oftentimes to determine that “it’s fine” because “no one got killed.”

In a separate undercover video, a man identified as Dillon Rice, a senior scriptwriter at MindGeek, said that there “probably was some like teen men and women like on there,” which could ultimately be removed, but that the moderation system is “so slow” that it stays on the site for long enough “that people get mad and sue them.”

Both Rice and Farley told stories of underage girls contacting Pornhub to get videos removed, and the company either moving extremely slowly or not taking the request seriously.

In Farley’s story, a 14-year-old girl asked for a video of herself to be removed from the site. “We would be like, ‘Whatever.’ We weren’t taking it seriously,” Farley said.

“I definitely feel like we weren’t compliant as a company; that’s obvious. We didn’t do the due diligence. Obviously, we should have, but at the same time, it’s like, don’t make a video that ends up, like, it’s like, it’s kind of like: What do you expect?” he continued. “How can I guarantee you that this girl wants to be on here and is over 18 and she’s aware that she’s here? How could I do that as a company? You can’t.”

Rice explained that even when a video gets flagged, “it’s hard” to prove the age of someone in a video, especially since they could have a fake identification card showing them older than they are. In addition, the site gets numerous foreign uploads, where countries have different systems for identification.

Part of the problem is that Pornhub, unlike many other pornography websites that use professional production studios to make content, is driven by user-generated content. Rice said that those production studios, which have legal documentation like a 2257 form to impose name and age verification, are viewed as “competition” by executives at MindGeek, which recently rebranded as Aylo.

Instead of opting to use legally verified content, Rice continued, underage content can still get uploaded to the site. Rice called the arrangement “backwards.”

“They made so much money, and they were like on top of the world, but they fumbled so hard because they didn’t take any of that money and reinvested it into moderation or like the quality of the site,” Rice said. “They just kind of gave it all to executives, and then they just made a s*** ton of profit. … They were kind of like very naive. They were like, ‘Oh, we’re like household brand, so like nothing bad can ever happened to us,’ and then it did.”

The video comes on the heels of another Sound Investigations publication last week in which Farley explained a “loophole” where underage videos could be uploaded and not verified because the people in the video do not show their faces.

He added that “f***ing everybody” exploits the “loophole,” including rapists, because they can “make a lot of money.” Farley, who said that there is “of course” still underage content on the site, also explained that MindGeek leadership told staff not to talk about it.

The videos, which were recorded secretively under various circumstances, including dates, come as MindGeek is the subject of multiple class-action lawsuits from underage victims of exploitation or sex trafficking who were subjected to videos being uploaded to Pornhub.

Documents recently revealed Pornhub executives set a roadblock for all content moderation.

However, in response to the videos, a Pornhub spokesman told the Washington Examiner that the implications of Rice’s and Farley’s statements are “categorically false,” explaining further that, generally, “neither writers, nor product managers, necessarily have insight into the company’s moderation practices and Trust and Safety procedures.”

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“They may say something — that doesn’t make it accurate,” he continued.

On the problem of bypassing upload protocols with fake IDs, the spokesman said only verified users with a government-issued identification card can post content and that those IDs are verified by Yoti, a third-party organization that uses biometric facial recognition. When asked whether that was the standard practice before 2020, the spokesman said it was not but that the “internet evolves.”