It was not just isolated to those searches. This was rampant. The story did not exaggerate, it found what it found. Some of these uploads ruined people’s lives. If it ruined just one, shut it down. The fact it was greater than one but less than some other number is not relevant.
IMO, I do not think a moderator or admin would solve the problem. Who verifies the age and that the consent is real? Who manages the records? Who is responsible when the system breaks down? We are so used to giving our privacy away so someone can make money, but this is over the top.
That stuff is everywhere on the internet if you searching hard for. I'd bet money Google serves up more kiddie porn than PornHub.
PH had millions of videos posted a year, of course a few of them had issues. The article took some specific examples and made it sound systematic and then further implied massive wrong doing by talking about the number of results from bad sounding search terms. I've listened to interviews with the author, it was a hit piece and he has an agenda.
But shutting PH will just push people to much shader platforms with no moderation, where there really is wide spread rape and kiddie porn. Who is going to take down torrents?
PH could have made improvements to their processes that didn't require purging everything and keeping a database of every known sex worker (which puts them at huge risk when that database is hacked).
I've done lots of searches on PH over the years and have never seen even role playing rape or obvious kiddie porn. Of course there is no way to know who consented to what, but that doesn't change with consent forms either. The GirlDoPorn people had consent forms, as an example.
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