I'm not very knowledgeable on all the different kinds of processes, but what I can say is that Pornhub always said that they had no idea what was on their site. Anybody could post and anybody could download what was on there, so they didn't know unless people would flag it and report it. And they said that they would take whatever was flagged and reported seriously, review it, and then take it down. But even with that, before all of this happened, before The New York Times article came out and the banks pulled out of supporting them, even when people would comment directly on the video, when they would flag it, report it, and even when I would message them over and over and over again telling them the actual age I was in the video and telling them that it is clearly child pornography and that it is me in the videos and that I would like them taken down, they would still take a while to respond to me, and then when they did respond to me, they would always try to feign ignorance and say, sorry, we didn't see this until now. They wouldn't apologize. They'd be like, oh, we didn't see this until now. Then they would basically tell me that I wasn't really telling the truth. They'd ask me to verify my identity over and over and over again to make sure I really was the girl who was in the video.
It was very frustrating talking to them, because I would sit there and type out a heartfelt response about how I was truly feeling about that video being online and what it was doing to me, and they would respond with “Prove it's you” and “Sorry, we can't do much other than that.” Even when it was very clear.... I still look young now. I have a little makeup on right now, but I'm told all the time that I look a lot younger than I actually am, because I hit puberty really late due to a hormone disorder I have that makes me age very slowly. So when I was 13 and 14, I still looked like I was nine or 10 years old, and it was very obvious that it was child pornography. Even without me having to verify my identity over and over and over again just to get one video taken down, they could still blatantly see that it was a child in the video.
On top of that, they told me that once a video was flagged as child pornography, it would be sent over to the authorities, to the people in America who deal with child pornography, who catalogue it, and that the actual video itself would be tagged so that it couldn't be uploaded again onto their site. That very obviously wasn't true, because the video would be uploaded over and over and over again. It wasn't that hard to find. It usually had around the same name or the same title and the same tags. It would always have the “pre-teen” or ”young teen”, “teen brunette”, “petite 13-year-old” or “small 14-year-old girl”. It was very blatantly obvious that it was marketed towards people who were looking for child pornography.
I believe that they really didn't care to make a change at all and that even under public scrutiny they were really dragging their feet to get on with it, to do what they said they were going to do, until money became involved, until the two big banks pulled out and said that they wouldn't allow it to be used on their platform anymore. Then all of a sudden, Pornhub can do anything they want about the videos. They can delete 10 million videos in a day, when before it took them weeks and sometimes even months, letting the videos get up to 3 million views of a 14-year-old girl before deleting them.
I don't know all the laws and everything, but I believe Pornhub's reaction to it was very delayed and was very money-based, not actually about protecting children or people in general.