#Ex-Pornhub moderator details ‘weird excuses’ to keep videos online

A former Pornhub moderator has come forward to reveal the lax policies and unusual measures the smut site took to enable illegal and disturbing content to flourish.

In an interview with Business Insider, an ex-moderator for parent company MindGeek said that content reviewers were tasked with finding “weird excuses to keep videos on our sites” rather than taking them down.

The former smut umpire claimed, for example, that a video whose title advertised a man having sex with “his mother” would not be allowed. But if the title were a more vague “mother f—s son,” the video could stay up because it didn’t explicitly state that the performers were related.

The moderators were required to sift through as many as 400 videos per day, with some describing the workload as having an impact on their personal lives by diminishing or increasing their sex drives.

Before Pornhub began receiving more scrutiny this year, the moderator said they would have allowed “videos depicting performers simulating scenes of sex involving a person who was asleep, some BDSM content, and videos with visible bottles of alcohol” to make it onto the site.

The team was also tasked with deciding which videos of people crushing animals would be allowed to remain on the site.

“At one point we were debating what creatures were OK to be stepped on,” the moderator said. “Crickets, insects, and crawfish were OK, but not goldfish, because people have goldfish as pets.”

Pornhub recently scrubbed more than 10 million videos from its site — the overwhelming majority of the smut that had been available — in a purge of illegal content after Visa and Mastercard cut ties with the site following a New York Times report.

In its biggest change, Pornhub will only allow verified users to upload videos to the site. That privilege is currently restricted to Pornhub’s content partners and members of its “Model Program,” which requires performers to verify their identities by uploading a photo of themselves.