Pornhub

Non-consensual pornography

Incidents have been reported of Pornhub hosting child pornography, revenge porn, and rape pornography. The company has been criticized for slow or inadequate responses to these incidents.

Pornhub employs Vobile to search for uploads of banned videos to remove them from the site, and non-consensual content or personally identifiable information present on Pornhub can be reported to the company via an online form. Pornhub has been criticized for its response to non-consensual pornography and sex trafficking. Journalists at Vice commented that Pornhub profits from "content that's destroyed lives, and continues to do harm". Slate said that the move reflected a larger trend of Internet platforms using verification to classify sources.

In 2009, a 14-year-old girl was gang raped at knifepoint and the videos were uploaded to Pornhub. The girl stated that she emailed Pornhub repeatedly over a period of six months but received no reply. Eventually the videos were removed. 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. In another incident of non-consensual pornography, the UK-based activist group #NotYourPorn 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. Pornhub removed the video when reported, but clones of the video using her full name replicated faster than the videos were removed. The woman found "the fractured communication system at Pornhub has meant this has become an increasingly excruciating process". The founder of Not Your Porn reported that fifty women contacted her over a six-month period about non-consensual online pornography featuring them, thirty of whom reported that the videos were uploaded to Pornhub.

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. A week afterwards, the official verified GirlsDoPorn channel – the 20th-largest channel at the time – was removed from the site. The delayed response was criticized by journalists at Daily Dot and Motherboard. Additionally, the videos could still be found afterwards unofficially on Pornhub's website. In December 2020, MindGeek, Pornhub's parent company was sued in California for hosting non-consensual videos produced by GirlsDoPorn, which coerced women into appearing in their videos under false pretenses. In January 2021, a class action lawsuit making similar claims was launched in Montreal. 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. 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.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) found 118 instances of child sexual abuse material on Pornhub between 2017 and 2019. Pornhub rapidly removed this content. 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. In 2020, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported that over 20 million reports of child sexual abuse material related to content on Facebook, accounting for 95% of total reports, and that Pornhub and other MindGeek sites were the subject of only 13,000 reports.

In response to abusive content on the site, an online petition calling for the shutdown of Pornhub gained over one million signatures throughout 2020. The petition was started by Laila Mickelwait, Director of Abolition at Exodus Cry, a Christian anti-trafficking and anti- sex-work non-profit. Her petition was addressed to the executives of MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub. It noted numerous instances of non-consensual and child abuse material on the website, including a child trafficking victim who was made a "verified model" by the site. In response to the petition, Pornhub claimed they were committed to removing such material from the site.

In December 2020, Nicholas Kristof's opinion column in The New York Times described Pornhub as a company that "monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags". In response to the column, Pornhub announced it would prevent video uploads from unverified users and would disable video downloads. Visa and Mastercard also announced they would review their financial ties to Pornhub. On 10 December 2020, Mastercard and Visa blocked use of their cards on Pornhub. Pornhub told the New York Times that these claims were "irresponsible and flagrantly untrue". Performer Siri Dahl expressed criticism that Visa and Mastercard's actions victimized pornographic performers, while Pornhub continued to make most of its money through banner ads. Kristof, in a follow-up 2025 column, cited internal documents that allegedly showed Pornhub employees joking about child sexual abuse material available and that moderators were aware of 706,000 videos that were flagged for unlawful content in 2020.

On 14 December 2020, Pornhub announced that all videos posted by unverified users had been removed from public access "pending verification and review". This reduced the number of videos on the website from 13 million to 4 million. In Brazil, according to Clayton Nunes, CEO of Brasileirinhas, the result of this action showed that the people who upload non-consensual pornography to Pornhub are the same people who upload pirated pornography. Following their ban on unverified user posting videos, Pornhub released a blog post where they compared those opposed to them to who "same forces that have spent 50 years demonizing Playboy, the National Endowment for the Arts, sex education, LGBTQ rights, women's rights, and even the American Library Association.

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.

A 2023 documentary, Money Shot: The Pornhub Story, covered the opposition to Pornhub and the views of pornographic performers. 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.

In 2023, a tool developed by Meta Platforms—Take It Down—was released. Participating platforms—including Pornhub—agree to remove non-consensual images or videos that users flag with the tool. Other participants include OnlyFans, Facebook, Yubo, and Instagram. The program relies on users uploading hashes of images and cannot identify edited versions of the image.

In September 2025, Pornhub's operators were required to establish a program to prevent the distribution of nonconsensual material on its websites and pay a $5 million penalty to the state of Utah in order to settle their charges of doing little to block videos and photos featuring nonconsensual material.

Non-pornographic content

Pornhub users have often uploaded non-pornographic content to the site, including posts of Hollywood films (believing copyright holders would be less likely to look for uploads on Pornhub relative to mainstream video-sharing services such as YouTube), to monetize content deemed ineligible for monetization, or as memes and jokes. These videos often have double entendre titles resembling porn films. Examples include a pirated recording of the musical Hamilton listed as "Revolutionary Boys Get Dirty on American Politics"; a clip from the animated film Puss in Boots listed as "Hardcore Pussy Gets Wrecked"; highlight compilations of esports events tagged as a "gangbang"; and Ryan Creamer videos featuring comedic clips with sexual titles. In 2014 internet users uploaded highlight videos of the Brazil v Germany match on Pornhub under ironic titles such as "Young Brazilians get fucked by entire German soccer team." The site has since deleted the highlight videos on copyright grounds and issued a plea for users to cease uploading the footage in question, jokingly tweeting that their "public humiliation category is full."

In March 2020, Pornhub premiered Leilah Weinraub's documentary Shakedown, which chronicles a black lesbian strip club of the same name in Los Angeles. The film streamed on the service throughout March, before being released via Criterion Channel. Brand director Alex Klein stated that the film's premiere on Pornhub was part of "a larger general commitment Pornhub has to supporting the arts".

Copyright infringement claims

In 2010, Mansef Inc. and Interhub, the then-owners of Pornhub, were sued by the copyright holding company of the pornographic film production company Pink Visual, Ventura Content, for the copyright infringement of 95 videos on websites, including Pornhub, Keezmovies, Extremetube, and Tube8. According to Ventura Content, the 45 videos were streamed "tens of millions of times", and they claimed the piracy threatened the "entire adult entertainment industry". The suit was settled in October 2010, with terms that remain confidential. The parties agreed that the site operators would implement digital fingerprint filtering on their sites. Porn 2.0 sites such as these are seen as posing notable competition for paid pornographic websites and traditional magazine and DVD-based pornography.

In July 2021, Pornhub launched Classic Nudes, an interactive guide of classic art from major institutions, as a means to help museums recover from the financial toll of the pandemic. 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".

Malvertising

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. Longmore told the BBC that of pornography websites, Pornhub and xHamster posed the greatest threat.

In 2017, security firm Proofpoint discovered malicious ads running on the site that had the potential to install override software on users' PCs. The ads had been promoted on the site for over a year without intervention from Pornhub.