In December 2020, following a New York Times exposé of non-consensual pornography and sex trafficking, payment processors Mastercard and Visa cut their services to Pornhub.
[13][14] In an effort to introduce quality curation to the site, the company launched a service called "Pornhub Select" in October 2013.
[15] Pornhub also launched a content curation website on 9 October 2013 called "PornIQ", which used an algorithm to create personalized video playlists for the viewer based on a number of factors, including their porn preferences, the time of day they are visiting the website, what part of the world they live in, and the amount of time the viewer has available.
The site hoped to launch the mission and shoot the movie in 2016, covering the pre- and post-production costs itself, but sought $3.4 million from IndieGogo crowdfunders.
[21] In October 2017, vice president Corey Price announced that Pornhub would use computer vision and artificial intelligence software to identify and tag videos on the website with information about the performers and sex acts.
[24] In December 2020, following a column in The New York Times by Nicholas Kristof that was critical of the company,[25] payment processors Mastercard and Visa cut their services to Pornhub.
[27] Another case in October 2019 involved a man who faces charges of lewd and lascivious battery of a 15-year-old girl, videos of which were discovered on Pornhub, Modelhub, Periscope, and Snapchat that led to his arrest.
[32] In another incident of non-consensual pornography, the UK-based activist group Not Your Porn was founded by the friend of a woman whose iCloud storage had been hacked, leading to the hacker posting sexually explicit photos and videos on Pornhub alongside her full name.
[27][33] On 10 October 2019, the two owners of GirlsDoPorn along with two employees were arrested on three counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion, after a civil lawsuit was filed in July.
The Canadian-proposed class action sought $600 million for anyone who had intimate photos and videos, some of which may have been taken when they were underage, shared on MindGeek's sites without their consent, since 2007.
[37] In June 2021, 34 women sued MindGeek in a California federal court, alleging that the company had exploited them and hosted and promoted videos that depicted rape, revenge porn, and child sexual abuse.
[40] An IWF spokesperson said that other social networks and communication tools posed more of an issue than Pornhub in regard to this type of content.
[41] In response to abusive content on the site, an online petition calling for the shutdown of Pornhub gained over one million signatures throughout 2020.
[42][43] The petition was started by Laila Mickelwait,[44] Director of Abolition at Exodus Cry, a Christian anti-trafficking and anti- sex-work non-profit.
[59] On 14 December 2020, Pornhub announced that all videos posted by unverified users had been removed from public access "pending verification and review".
[8] In April 2021, Vice reported that individuals tied to far-right and Christian fundamentalist groups, which claim to be anti-trafficking and anti-pornography activists, disseminated disinformation and made death threats towards Pornhub's staff and sex workers.
It featured interviews with Kristof, a lawyer representing women suing MindGeek and a spokesperson for the anti-sex-trafficking group National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
Examples include a pirated recording of the musical Hamilton listed as "Revolutionary Boys Get Dirty on American Politics";[65] a clip from the animated film Puss in Boots listed as "Hardcore Pussy Gets Wrecked";[66] highlight compilations of esports events tagged as a "gangbang";[67] and Ryan Creamer videos featuring comedic clips with sexual titles.
[68] In March 2020, Pornhub premiered Leilah Weinraub's documentary Shakedown, which chronicles a black lesbian strip club of the same name in Los Angeles.
[70] According to Ventura Content, the 45 videos were streamed "tens of millions of times",[71] and they claimed the piracy threatened the "entire adult entertainment industry".
[73] Porn 2.0 sites such as these are seen as posing notable competition for paid pornographic websites and traditional magazine and DVD-based pornography.
However, The Louvre, Uffizi Gallery, and Museo del Prado sued Pornhub for copyright infringement, claiming that the museums had never "granted authorizations for the operation or use of the art.
"[77][78][79] In 2013, researcher Conrad Longmore found that advertisements displayed by popular porn websites contained malware programs, which install harmful files on users' machines without their permission.
[80] In 2017, security firm Proofpoint discovered malicious ads running on the site that had the potential to install override software on users' PCs.
The first of these events took place in New York City on 24 April 2012, with the introduction of the "Boob Bus",[91][92] which offered free breast exams for passers-by and taught self-examination techniques to use at home.
[114] According to research by data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, 25% of female searches for heterosexual porn on Pornhub involved keywords for painful, humiliating, or non-consensual sex.
[115][116] The Insights also found that the lesbian category has been consistently the most popular among female viewers since 2014 when gender statistics were first gathered (except in 2020 when the data was limited), and that women in general regardless of sexual orientation are more likely to search for lesbian-associated terms such as "scissoring" than men.
[158][156][159] In 2021, a TikTok trend went viral, where one plays the Pornhub community intro and gauges reactions to catch unexpected people who visit the website.