A key part of the government’s current proposals to deal with online harms is the establishment of a regulator to monitor and enforce the terms and conditions of tech and porn companies. Sounds sensible, but is this going to make a big difference?
Think about the terms and conditions of the ferry company that was going to take the load in the event of a no-deal Brexit – downloaded from a local takeaway!
May sound like a one-off example, but our research has found that the terms of the three largest porn sites in the UK seem similarly fanciful.
Pornhub, for example, proscribes any content “depicting child pornography, rape, snuff, torture, death, violence or incest, racial slurs or hate speech” or any content that is “obscene, illegal, unlawful, defamatory, libelous, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive”. And that’s not all. They also say they don’t want material that is “unlawful, threatening, harassing, hateful or encourages conduct that would be considered a criminal offence, violate any law, or is otherwise inappropriate”.
Very similar provisions can be found in the T&Cs of Xhamster and Xvideos, including the prohibition of material “depicting or implying rape, forced sexual acts… or promotes incest”.
What is striking about all these terms is that they cover the depiction of acts such as rape, material implying acts of sexual violence and any content that promotes or encourages criminal behaviours. The material supposedly prohibited is not, therefore, limited to “real” acts of sexual violence, but includes simulations.
Where’s the fiction? Well, over a period of six months, we found in excess of 10,000 videos on the landing pages of Pornhub, Xhamster, and XVideos depicting acts that their titles suggest explicitly contravene their T&Cs.
We analysed the titles of the videos uploaded and found that descriptions of sexual activity between family members was common, particularly sexual activity between immediate family members related by blood. Just a few examples should convey the sort of material we are talking about: ‘Brother f**k her sister in her sleep’; ‘When Mom’s Mad, Dad Goes To His Daughter’; ‘Daddy keeps f**king daughter till she likes it’.
Titles identifying material as constituting image-based sexual abuse was also evident, focused largely on videos created without consent, particularly voyeurism videos using hidden or ‘spy’ cameras and upskirting. Such as: ‘F**ks Sleeping Mom Hidden Camera’; ‘Beach Spy Changing Room Two Girls’; ‘Pharmacy Store Bathroom Hidden cam’; ‘Upskirted While Putting Groceries In The Car’.
Finally, we found many titles describing coercive and exploitative sexual activity, for example: ‘Boyfriend forced gf for sex’ and ‘She Woke Up Being F**ked’
Let’s be clear: these videos were not hidden in the deep recesses of the sites and we didn’t need to search to find them. They were freely and immediately advertised on the home page: their ‘shop window’ for the young and new to the world of online porn. This is a stark failure in the duty of care of these porn companies towards their users: not only can someone easily and accidentally see material the sites themselves deem inappropriate, it also means that the algorithms setting what appears on these landing pages are not set to exclude such content.
We can only suppose then that the T&Cs are known to be irrelevant to what can actually be uploaded and viewed on the porn sites. And that this is not material that the websites themselves want to keep off their front pages.
All this suggests that such websites have little interest in self-regulation. If the government is serious about holding online companies to account for their duty of care towards users, it seems likely that a much more proactive approach will be needed to ensure porn companies, at the very least, comply with their own terms, let alone enforcing any more robust rules advocated by a regulator.
And, ultimately, if we don’t want material depicting or promoting sexual violence on mainstream pornography websites, more radical measures will need to be taken.