Creative Destruction, Pornhub, and Section 230

​Tube pornography on the Internet has disrupted the pornography business, leapfrogging existing delivery systems, and perhaps accelerated the rate of change in human sexuality.  Like Starlink, SpaceX, and Amazon have been creative destruction engines for their markets, Tube pornography has destroyed the existing production and delivery of pornography and in the process has posed ethical questions for detailed examination.

Tube pornography (Tube) is a pornography website with an interface like YouTube: user-uploaded videos, a system of ratings, and the number of views.  Tube sites do not only encourage original content they do not discourage or reprimand users who post pirated content and so Tube sites are mostly comprised of hijacked videos from feature-length pornographic films.  They are responsible for many thousands of lost jobs in adult films and cutting wages to about half for those who work in the adult industry.

​This industry distributes salacious content to subscribers via the Internet and generates revenue through advertisements and membership subscriptions.  While many industry companies are vertically integrated and involved in shooting pornographic videos, the majority simply manage adult websites and do not create original content.

The apparent largest is a site called Pornhub.  Pornhub is owned by Mindgeek, a private Canadian pornography firm managing more than 100 websites.  Mindgeek’s websites include Brazzers, ExtremeTube, GayTube, Men, My Dirty Hobby, PornMD, Redtube, SpankWire, Thumbzilla, Youporn, and XTube.  As Mindgeek is privately owned, cracking the books and understanding the economics of their business model is impossible so one is left with a few breadcrumbs.

​Mindgeek self-publishes its analytics for their flagship Pornhub.  An examination of that data should take into consideration its validity, but regardless they provide some interesting data for 2019:

• There were over 42 billion visits to Pornhub, which means there was an average of 115 million visits per day.  There were about 3.5 billion visits a month, more than Netflix or Amazon.
• About 6.83 million new videos were uploaded to Pornhub.
• The United States continues to be the country with the highest traffic, followed by the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Canada, France, and Germany
• The average visit duration was 10 minutes 28 seconds.
• Female visitors grew to 32%, an increase of 3 percentage points over 2018.
• Four of the top 10 porn stars searched by women are strictly gay male performers and 37% of gay male porn was watched by women on Pornhub
• Pornhub was the 10th-most-visited website in the world.
• The average age of Pornhub users was 36-years.

Tube sites have disrupted delivery methods and economics of the pornography industry and the rise of Tube sites and amateur content is responsible for much of this change.  Professional porn producers and performers must now compete with the enormous measure of unrestricted porn available on Tube sites.  With this amplified competition, the wages for porn actors and production employees have dropped significantly.  Wages for female artists have declined from an average of $800 to $600 per sex scene, while male performers earn even less.

Camming is a new category of porn where players can interact with their viewers in real-time.  Webcam performers are also able to shop themselves directly to viewers without the need for studios, agents, contracts, or corporations, giving them augmented control over their toil and eliminating roles in the pornography supply chain.

Moralists, primarily the religious, have made a cottage industry of finger-wagging and shaming viewers of pornography since it was invented.  Certainly, that has increased as the Internet floodgates have released but one is compelled to wonder, given the consistent revelations of sexual antics by Christian leaders such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Jr, if they might be protesting a bit too much.

​Arguments against Tube site pornography are manifold:

• People can get addicted to pornography.
• It provides illegal content such as rape, torture, and pedophilia.
• The industry is exploitive of its workers.
• Watching pornography causes sexual crime.

Pornography addiction is not a psychological disorder according to the DSM V.  There is much debate regarding whether pornography use has positive or negative associations with sexual functioning problems.  Multiple studies have reported no significant associations between pornography and sexual functioning in males while in females, pornography has been associated with better sexual functioning.  Population studies suggested that increased availability of pornography is associated with reduced sexual aggression at the population level.

The exploitation of sex workers is a topic of much discussion but little action.  As sex work is illegal in most parts of the world protecting this population seems hopeless.  Legalization of sex work would allow for open discussion and allow for these workers to be covered under existing labor laws but this discussion is unlikely to happen in an environment of hyperbolic moral probity. 

​Simple prohibition of pornographic content is problematic due to free speech issues as well as its ubiquity on the Internet.  Regardless, the prohibition of the forbidden never has been seen to consistently work in the history of such endeavor.

The questions of illegal content are troubling and should be examined.  According to credible accounts, there are underage performers in some of these videos.  The amount of such content is unknown.  Pirated videos illegally harvest income due to the production company and hypothetically to the performers and should also be disallowed.  Unfortunately, due to current law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, this is difficult to manage.

​Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230).   In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for illegal content and particularly for content that is exploitive of children or depicts non-consensual violence.  As this matter has recently become a tribal political matter with President Trump attempting to achieve legislative appeal, it appears it will remain stuck in political gridlock.  Nevertheless, this should be seriously considered, both in this matter and social media in general.

Pornhub’s self-published statistics can be found at https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review.  A conversation about why people watch pornography can be found at https://doi.org/10.1037/adb0000603.  A discussion of the effects of pornography can be found at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306460320307334.  A meta-analysis of pornography and sexual aggression is presented at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1524838020942754.  A moralist’s opinion piece is offered at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html.  A discussion of Section 230 can be discovered at https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230.