People use the internet for various purposes, demanding various things, trying to fulfill various desires.
And on the internet, one of the very few things that see constant increase in demands, without the industry even trying, is pornography.
And one of the largest providers of online pornography, Pornhub, which definitely sees the kinky and the naughty side of many users of the internet, also see requests that include child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
To help these people, whenever someone searched for such content on Pornhub in the UK, a chatbot appear.
The popular adult entertainment website has interrupted 4.4 million attempts from people who typed in words or phrases linked to CSAM.
Besides interrupting visitors, Pornhub's UK website also show a warning message, saying that it has blocked the page, and explains how such content is illegal.
The bot also provides links that point those people to where they can seek help.
And according to the website, in half the cases, those people did seek help.
There were 1,656 requests for more information made through the chatbot, while 490 people clicked through to the charity’s Stop It Now website. Around 68 people called or chatted with Lucy Faithfull’s confidential helpline, the report said.
The chatbot was relatively simple: It asked people a series of questions, allowing them to click buttons to answer or type out a response.
Ultimately, it explained that the material people were searching for may be illegal and pointed them toward help services.
The warning message and the 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.
While the message was triggered millions of times, "The actual raw numbers of searches, it’s actually quite scary high,” said Joel Scanlan, a senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania, who led the evaluation of the reThink Chatbot.
From the 4,400,960 warnings in response to CSAM-linked searches on Pornhub’s UK website, 99% of all searches during the trial did not trigger a warning.
Most people who received the warning message and chatbot stopped looking for CSAM, and searched for something else.
Around 1.7 million people saw a warning before leaving Pornhub or making other searches related to legal material.
"They didn't just disappear. They typically remained on the site and looked for other stuff," Donald Findlater, the director of the Stop It Now helpline, said.
Not everyone was deterred, however.
In the most persistent cases, around 400 people made 10 searches that triggered the message.
Regardless, the report says there was a "meaningful decrease" in searches for CSAM on Pornhub, and that at least "in part" the chatbot and warning messages appear to have played a role.
"There’s a significant reduction over the length of the intervention in numbers of searches," Scanlan says.
"So the deterrence messages do work."
According to Findlater, while the numbers are "relatively modest" compared to the overall number of warnings displayed, they are still seen as a "big success," because people engaging with the help line means that people do want to get help.
"If people have been doing something dodgy on a site, clicking through is quite a bold step to make."
This is one way Pornhub tries to fight illegal content, and that it's part of the company’s efforts aimed at user safety.
Pornhub, which is owned by parent company Aylo (formerly MindGeek), uses a list of 34,000 banned terms, across multiple languages and with millions of combinations, to block searches for child abuse material, a spokesperson for the company says.
The chatbot was designed and created by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a nonprofit which removes CSAM from the web, and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a charity which works to prevent child sexual abuse.
The web contains pretty much everything humanity can ever imagine.
This is because the web's content is a collection of its users requests, and needs. And when there are demands, there will be supplies.
Millions of images and videos of CSAM are found and removed from the web every year.
They are shared on social media, traded in private chats, sold on the dark web, or in some cases uploaded to legal pornography websites.
Tech companies and porn companies don’t allow illegal content on their platforms, although they remove it with different levels of effectiveness.
As for Pornhub, the website removed around 10 million videos in 2020 in an attempt to eradicate child abuse material and other problematic content from its website.
The approach is considered successful, because the warning message 'warns' people, telling them that what they're doing is illegal.
The message simply applies that information as a legal knowledge, informing those people that the cost of their behavior may outweigh any benefits they expect.
"If someone's doing that sort out of curiosity, you want to nudge them away from it before they get involved in it, because we can't arrest our way out of the problem," said Scanlan, who conducted the analysis into the chatbot trial.
It's worth noting that the data provided by Pornhub, the IWF and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation wasn’t always complete, and there weren’t any figures from before the warnings were introduced to compare the results against.
