The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet

FOR MORE THAN a decade, both amateurs and professionals shared their sometimes sweet, sometimes weird, and often graphic sexual activity on Pornhub. Launched in 2007 not long after YouTube and with a similar free-for-all spirit, the site represented a new wave of “adult entertainment” in which anyone with an internet connection could partake and anyone with a digital camera could become a star.

Dubbed “tube sites,” Pornhub and its various peers began to dominate web traffic generally and porn consumption specifically. These sites trod on porn’s established business model, but for savvy sex workers the tube site network could provide a way to break into the business or reach audiences directly, without the porn industry’s usual middlemen. To monetize one’s presence in the early days took some creativity, but tube sites would eventually offer content partnerships that allowed people to get paid directly for their videos. Their competitors, such as cam sites and clip stores, made the process of charging money and getting paid even smoother.

The result? For the first time, people with a truly diverse array of body types, looks, races, ethnicities, sexualities, gender identities, and kinks had direct access to the tools of porn production and distribution. In the past, porn had catered to a much more narrow range of tastes, with predictable results. Now audiences could access all sorts of content that defied conventional notions of who and what was deserving of lust. On sites like Pornhub and the microblogging platform Tumblr, outside-the-mainstream content thrived.

And then, one day, it was gone.

In December 2020, without warning, Pornhub removed all videos posted by unverified users—a massive cache of content encompassing anything not posted by formal content partners or members of the platform’s official model program. More than 10 million videos were suspended, and unverified users were banned from uploading or downloading new videos.

It was more than a disruption to the site. The unannounced disappearing of so many videos was “a huge cultural loss,” says Ashley, a transgender sex worker and civil rights activist with a robust presence on social media and in offline organizing. (At Ashley’s request, we’re identifying her by first name only.) Ashley volunteers with the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) Behind Bars, a group dedicated to helping incarcerated sex workers. She recently helped spearhead a campaign protesting financial discrimination against sex workers and LGBTQ content creators. Unverified videos, Ashley says, are “inclusive, just by definition, of all the queer content that people felt unsafe with being directly affiliated with.”

The Pornhub purge came about two years after Tumblr’s ban on any content depicting sex acts, and preceded a similar announcement in summer 2021 from OnlyFans, a subscription content site popularized by sex workers. OnlyFans would later reverse this edict, but the fate of adult content on the site remains uncertain.

Then, in September 2021, the first user-uploaded porn site—Xtube, founded in 2006 and now owned by the same parent company as Pornhub—shut down entirely.

Demand for online porn hasn’t weakened, at least not according to web traffic numbers. Nor do there seem to be fewer people willing to create and post it; it’s not uncommon to hear sex workers complain about the glut of adult content creators these days.

Nonetheless, it’s a financially