Two in every three Pornhub videos are gone after a purge to remove child porn

• Pornhub, the adult video streaming website, deleted over 9 million videos from its content library on December 14 shrinking its overall library by two-thirds.
• These videos will be filtered through a verification process before they are put back on the pornography website.
• The move becomes after a New York Times investigation revealed that Pornhub was hosting videos featuring underage and sex-trafficked subjects.
  

Pornhub’s library is now only a fraction of what it used to be. The Canda-based internet pornography website removed million of videos after coming under the scanner for featuring underaged and sex-trafficked people.

The purge has brought the total number of videos on Pornhub down from 13.5 million to just 4.7 million, according to Motherboard. This includes not only the removal of videos that have underage girls, but any and all content that has been uploaded by unverified users.

"As part of our policy to ban unverified uploaders, we have now also suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or members of the Model Program," said the adult website.

The most-viewed video, uploaded by an unverified source, had garnered more than 29 million views before it was removed.

However, Pornhub points out that the issue of child abuse content is only unique to adult websites. Where the Watch Foundation found 118 instances of child abuse material on Pornhub over the last years, Facebook’s own transparency report found 84 million instaces.

Some of the deleted videos may return
Even though over 9 million videos have been deleted from Pornhub’s inventory, they may not be gone forever.

The company has said that videos will be reviewed and verified. If they pass the verification process, they could make it back onto the streaming catalogue. However, the verification process will only begin after the New Year.

The shift in Pornhub’s policies
The giant shift comes after Visa and Mastercard decided to halt all payments to Pornhub last week on December 10.

Prior to the ban, the company had already announced its new policy to limit who can upload videos on the site.Before this, anyone could sign up with an account and behing to upload videos.

And some of those videos were less than savoury. And, the dominos began to fall after an investigation by the New York Times’ (NYT) revealed that Pornhub was hosting non-consensual and child abuse content on its website.

It should be noted that this was only the most recent development after activists have long protested the practices behind how videos are uploaded on the website.

Pornhub did modify its policies after the investigation, however, two days later Visa and Mastercard stopped processing payments on Pornhub — as a direct result of the NYT article, according to Reuters.

Videos that have been suspended on the site will now flash a notice saying, “Video has been flagged for verification in accordance with our trust and safety policy.”

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