This marks a distinct improvement over the previous Pornhub practices, which required subjects to submit an email request. The straightforward form asks only for the submitter’s name, email address, and contentious link URL, and asks, “Have you ever agreed to the distribution of this content?” With a digital signature for authentication, the process is about as simple as it gets.
60 million people visit the popular pornography site every single day (there were 18.35 billion total visits last year), and while Pornhub has not publicized the number of revenge porn-related requests it receives, it did tell The Verge that the number of these inquires has decreased 38 percent in the last two years.
“It is vital that we continue to make our community feel safe,” Corey Price, Pornhub vice president, told The Verge in an email. “We want all Pornhub users to know that this new reporting process is for their security and peace of mind first and foremost.” By removing much of the unnecessary administrative red tape, Price and his team hope that the new protocol will make reporting the crime easier. “Being a revenge porn victim is embarrassing enough as it is,” Price noted. “We would rather not make the reporting process equally awkward.”
Still, a number of experts point out that while Pornhub’s move is certainly laudable, it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of revenge porn, especially since most victims don’t realize that footage has been distributed until long after it first appears online. And with the rapid circulation that our digital age allows, attorney Elisa D’Amico notes that victims are still “left chasing fruit flies with a butterfly net.”
Of course, the hope is that Pornhub’s newest reporting process will actually serve as a “preemptive strike” against such content, and at the very least, as lawyer David Bateman told The Verge, “the more that websites are willing to respect the rights of revenge porn victims the better off the world is going to be.”
