Ethical Capital Partners

For the past two years, millions of people searching for child abuse videos on Pornhub’s UK website have been interrupted. Each of the 4.4 million times someone has typed in words or phrases linked to abuse, a warning message has blocked the page, saying that kind of content is illegal. And in half the cases, a chatbot has also pointed people to where they can seek help. The warning message and chatbot were deployed by Pornhub as part of a trial program, conducted with two UK-based child protection organizations, to find out whether people could be nudged away from looking for illegal material with small interventions. A new report analyzing the test, shared exclusively with WIRED, says the pop-ups led to a decrease in the number of searches for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and saw scores of people seek support for their behavior.

Pornhub’s parent company and its Ottawa-based ownership group are joining forces with Crime Stoppers International in an attempt to better police the world’s largest adult entertainment site. Crime Stoppers International has entered into a “working relationship” with Aylo, the renamed parent company of Pornhub, to provide internet tipsters with an anonymous place to report suspect material, to review Aylo’s phalanx of online trust and safety measures, and to share the company’s technology with its police partners. Crime Stoppers International CEO Shane Britten was in Ottawa last week to meet with officials from Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity firm that bought Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, almost one year ago. In an interview, Britten said the two organizations see eye-to-eye on the need to reduce harm on the internet. “It’s all about how can we make the internet safer for people,” said Britten, a former counter-terrorism investigator with Australia’s security intelligence service. “We’re looking for anything that can bring a force multiplier to police.” Crime Stoppers deputy CEO Hayley Van Loon said she believes Pornhub’s video fingerprinting technology will make the internet a safer place once it’s shared with law enforcement.