A Pornhub Chatbot Stopped Millions From Searching for Child Abuse Videos

Published:  Thu 29 Feb 2024

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.

“The actual raw numbers of searches, it’s actually quite scary high,” says Joel Scanlan, a senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania, who led the evaluation of the reThink Chatbot. During the multiyear trial, there were 4,400,960 warnings in response to CSAM-linked searches on Pornhub’s UK website—99 percent of all searches during the trial did not trigger a warning. “There’s a significant reduction over the length of the intervention in numbers of searches,” Scanlan says. “So the deterrence messages do work.”

Read the full article at WIRED.

AI tools have put child sexual abuse ‘on steroids’, Home Secretary warns

AI tools have put child sexual abuse ‘on steroids’, Home Secretary warns

The Home Office said fake images are being used to blackmail children and force them to livestream further abuse.

2 February 2025 IWF In The News
UK makes use of AI tools to create child abuse material a crime

UK makes use of AI tools to create child abuse material a crime

Britain will make it illegal to use artificial intelligence tools that create child sexual abuse images.

1 February 2025 IWF In The News
Charity finds more than 500,000 child abuse victims

Charity finds more than 500,000 child abuse victims

An analyst who removes child sexual abuse content from the internet says she is always trying to stay "one step ahead" of the "bad guys".

8 December 2024 IWF In The News