There are 175,000 searches for sexual images on Pornhub that trigger child-abuse checks every month in the UK alone, according to data provided by a groundbreaking new chatbot designed to intercept illegal activity on the adult site.
The startling figures are revealed as the chatbot is rolled out on Pornhub, the world’s biggest pornography site, after a trial that began in March.
When someone visiting the Pornhub site uses one of 28,000 words that are linked to the abuse of children – including codewords – it will prompt a pop-up message informing them that no results exist and that they are searching for potentially abusive and illegal imagery.
The user will then be directed into a conversation about their behaviour and encouraged to get help from Stop It Now!, a helpline aimed at supporting offenders and preventing people watching online child abuse.
Tech experts at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) – a UK-based organisation that removes images of child abuse from the internet – have spent more than two years designing the chatbot, using research gathered from offenders by a child protection charity, the Lucy Faithfull Foundation. The project has been funded by Safe Online – End Violence Against Children. Pornhub agreed to host the technology.
This is the first time a chatbot has been used to target potential abusers and the charities say they were pleased when Pornhub’s owner, MindGeek, allowed them to use it on its site. Pornhub is visited by 15 million people a month in the UK alone, a larger audience than many mainstream TV channels.
Susie Hargreaves, the chief executive of the IWF, says moving into prevention is vital. “The courts can’t keep up with this crime,” she says.
“In 2021, we removed a quarter of a million webpages containing child sexual abuse material from the internet – an increase of 64% on 2020. In the first month of the UK lockdown there were eight million attempts to access just three of the websites on our block list. These are really scary numbers.
“Prevention is key and it is to MindGeek’s credit that they stepped up to help. We needed a site with a lot of traffic, which MindGeek have provided, and I should stress that this year we have removed 169,000 pages so far with illegal content from the internet, and only one of them was on Pornhub.”
Child abuse charities are aware that working with MindGeek will be seen as a divisive move. The company has faced a string of serious allegations in recent years related to allegations of nonconsensual videos, films of children and extreme content on its sites.
In 2020 MindGeek announced it would be banning unverified video uploads after allegations by the New York Times that it had been hosting child abuse videos. MindGeek came under huge pressure to make reforms to its operating model – including losing the business of Mastercard and Visa. An investigation in the New Yorker this year reported that nonconsensual and underage videos – including those with children – have ended up on Pornhub.
The investigation follows a 2021 lawsuit that alleged MindGeek violated US sex trafficking and child pornography laws by allowing, and profiting from, its users to post pornographic videos featuring people under the age of 18. MindGeek has denied the allegations.
MindGeek’s chief executive, Feras Antoon, and its chief operating officer, David Tassillo, resigned in June, though MindGeek rejected claims the resignations were linked to the allegations.
Donald Findlater is the director of Stop It Now! and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation. He acknowledges the very serious criticisms of MindGeek in recent years but said working with them has helped reach many offenders at the beginning of their journey.
“We thought very long and hard about a collaboration with Pornhub. But this is pragmatic. We know from speaking to people who contact our helpline or who are arrested that their route to watching the abuse of children often involves accessing legal porn and then searching from there.
“To be clear, that is not the journey all offenders make, but it is the journey for some and we need to serve warnings to them – that children were harmed to make these images and are further harmed by continual viewing.”
The numbers involved in the online child abuse crisis are huge and growing all the time. About 850 people, virtually all of them men, are arrested each month in England and Wales for downloading indecent images or grooming children online. In 2010 there were only 407 arrests across the entire year – a 25-fold rise.
Dan Sexton is the chief technology officer at the IWF. “Our job is to eliminate child sexual abuse so we need to go where we can do that – that would apply to many websites,” he says. “If we can reach people earlier, reduce the number of people who search for children, then it will reduce demand.”
The Guardian has previously reported on concerns around pornography that fetishises child abuse, rape, incest and “revenge porn”.
Hargreaves did not want to comment on wider criticisms that the porn industry promotes fantasies of sex with minors through films acted by adults. “The issue is so huge, we have to focus on real children who are being sexually abused.”
A spokesperson for Pornhub said: “Pornhub has zero tolerance for child sexual abuse material, and we are honoured to partner with leading organisations like IWF and Stop It Now! to deploy this groundbreaking technology that will help deter bad actors before they commit a crime. While Pornhub utilises deterrence messaging worldwide, the chatbot serves as an additional layer of social intervention being piloted in the UK.
“We encourage other tech platforms to implement tools like the chatbot as part of a strategy of deterrence.”
Findlater is optimistic that despite the huge scale of the challenge, the chatbot is just the beginning. He says: “UK law enforcement and tech experts are really at the forefront globally of tackling the online child-abuse crisis and I think this chatbot can continue to grow and develop and eventually protect children from abuse which is what we all want to achieve.”
In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
