I reviewed 1K PornHub videos a day to keep underage girls off the site
A former Pornhub employee has revealed shocking details about his job.
The website moderator spoke anonymously to the creators of the upcoming Netflix feature “Money Shot: The Pornhub Story,” according to an Insider report.
In the documentary, he explained that he and about 30 other moderators were tasked with watching 800 to 1,000 videos during an eight-hour shift at the Cyprus office of MindGeek, Pornhub’s parent company, and were left to “guess” the ages of the people in the sexually explicit clips.
“Many videos that should have been taken down stayed up for months,” he admitted in the documentary, which will be available to stream on Wednesday.
“We were scrubbing through the videos as fast as we could. Even if we thought we were being diligent we missed videos every now and then,” he continued.
The unnamed employee also shared that he and his co-workers were left to “guess” if a person on the screen was at least 18 years old.
“You can’t tell the age of somebody — they could be 14 or they could be 19. We would have to guess,” he said reiterating that it’s “really hard” to determine someone’s age from one clip.
“Basically, we would just guess then my manager would decide if the video would be taken down for good, or if it would go live again,” he continued. “The rules constantly changed.”
He also revealed that the moderators often reviewed clips without sound, which lawyer Dani Pinter, Senior Legal Counsel at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, noted would mean that “he wouldn’t hear if someone was screaming or saying ‘Stop.’”
“I think the company could have done more to prevent certain things and only changed some things after it got in trouble,” the former employee told the filmmakers.
Pornhub launched on May 25, 2007, and quickly became one of the most popular online pornography platforms, reaching millions of daily visits within a few months — helped by the fact that the videos are free for all to view.
The site became known as “the YouTube of porn,” allowing unverified users to upload sexually explicit content — but it quickly spiraled out of control.
Pinter claims in the documentary that Pornhub was “knowingly profiting from sex trafficking” for years before attempting to change any of its policies.
Pornhub pledged to crack down on illegal content after a 2020 New York Times exposé written by Nicholas Kristof raised concerns about the platform being infested with videos of rape and child sex abuse.
“The more I explored the more aghast I became,” he said in the trailer for the documentary. “I found too many cases of kids whose worst moments were preserved in amber.”
His exposé prompted Visa and Mastercard to reconsider their business relationships with Pornhub, which is owned by the Luxembourg-based porn conglomerate MindGeek.
A representative from MindGeek told The Post that the company “has zero tolerance for illegal material or the bad actors who attempt to upload it on the internet.”
They claimed that their “policy is to immediately remove any content that is found to be in violation of our terms of service, and to review any material that is reported by users, with no questions asked.”
The representative also explained that “no user can upload content to our platforms without uploading a government-issued ID that passes third-party verification” and “any user has the ability to disable a piece of content on our platforms.”
They were also adamant that “any insinuation that we do not have enough moderators to thoroughly review all uploaded content is categorically false.”
The changes made to Pornhub didn’t go far enough, according to some critics — but went too far for others.
At the time, the NCOSE senior vice president and executive director Dawn Hawkins released a statement insisting that “Pornhub cannot be trusted” after it “profited for years from rape, child sexual abuse material, sex trafficking, and revenge pornography.”
However, ostensibly legitimate sex workers were distraught by some of the changes made to the site claiming that they lost all of their income and agency.
“They neglect to see that sex work and sex trafficking are two completely different things,” Asa Akira said in the trailer.
Pornhub continues to be embroiled in lawsuits and scandals as the site tries to protect the people in the videos while allowing sex workers to monetize their own content.
“Money Shot: The Pornhub story” will begin streaming on Netflix March 15. The Post reached out to Netflix for further comment, but has not received an immediate response.
