As someone who works in the adult industry, especially as a female, you hear all the possible pervy comments in the world. But there’s one comment that stands out:

‘Do you moderate the porn?’ (Just imagine this in a kind of creepy, seductive tone…)

This is one of the comments that I receive the most, and it’s always quite an insane comment to me because there really is nothing sexy about moderation, it is one of the most grueling jobs, and it is rarely spoken about. However, as pornographic and social media consumers,we need to be ask ourselves two questions:

Who is moderating our porn and how? Who is making the rules between what type of content is acceptable, and what is not? In this article I will uncover both of these important questions.

Who’s moderating my porn and how? Just like on social media platforms, there are two types of moderation forms in the adult space: human and AI. There are pros and cons to both of these forms.

AI:

There’s a lot of talk and hype about AI nowadays, but it’s important to not get lost in the hype, and have a bit of a reality check. When it comes to moderation AI can be great because it can reduce the issues that come along with human moderation such as mental health issues or desensitization. However, the AI hype can cloud a lot of people’s judgment and understanding of moderation.

The reality is; AI moderation has a lot of flaws. Firstly, AI moderation makes a lot of mistakes, and can’t always understand the nuances, resulting in a lot of unfair censorship and discrimination. Moderation mistakes are natural, but the problem is then that most platforms do not have a proper process where you can contest the moderation decision.

Secondly, something that a lot of people don’t realize is that AI moderation currently works well for photos, but it is not yet good enough to handle video moderation.

Lastly, most AI models are built to stop pornographic content, not to allow it. And so, this doesn’t exactly fit well with adult sites as it doesn’t fit their moderation needs. For instance, when we moderate pornographic content on Freyja there are a couple things that we are doing:

We are checking that the performer in the content is KYC verified in our system. This means we compare their ID with reference images and more We check that it meets our guidelines We check that no one else is in the content that is not also verified in our system and tagged correctly Then if not all three criteria are met, then the content is not posted. But there is currently no AI model that can do all of that.

In sum, AI can be a good moderation tool, but it currently has a number of flaws. There also needs to be a new type of AI approach to the pornographic industry, one that can understand the nuances of the content and the needs of the industry.

Humans:

All these issues with AI and its failure to understand certain sexual nuances, is why human moderators are still very relevant in today's pornographic industry. Most companies do not have in-house moderators, but outsource this from specialized companies. This is mainly due to the fact that by using a moderation company it is much easier to scale. But, companies should make sure that they are using moderation companies where moderators are being fairly compensated, and also being offered mental health support.

When thinking about human moderators, some people have the misconception that it slows down the moderation process But, this is not the case. A human moderator can go through hundreds to thousands of contents in just the space of 10 minutes. One of the biggest advantages of using human moderators, especially for porn, is that they can understand some of the contexts of the content itself, which AI cannot always do as it’s trained against pornography.

For example, when I first started Freyja, I thought that I wanted to stamp out sexism. Sound’s good right? Well, think about the fact that in porn people use terms such as ‘slut’ all the time, but that doesn’t always mean that the content is sexist. So, if you were to just ban that word, then you would have a lot of moderation errors. Moderation is subjective and it’s often a case by case thing, and that is when human moderators are beneficial to evaluate that case by case, and not make the same mistakes as AI.

Nevertheless, there is a downside to using human moderators which is the mental health side. Human moderators see a LOT of things that you would not want to see. They really are the protectors of the internet. But having to continuously view problematic content such as rape videos, or child abuse clearly can have an effect on the psyche. Similarly, overtime you find yourself becoming very desensitized to the content that you are viewing. I have done a lot of moderation shifts myself, because as a rule of thumb for my company, I don’t think I should be allowed to make moderation guidelines if I don’t do some moderation myself. And when doing too much moderation you definitely notice the shift in your mood, or the effects in your personal life. This is why it is important that all moderators have capped shifts, and mental health support. And so, you can really evaluate how good a porn or social media is on the ‘ethical’ scale, by their transparency about human moderators' treatment.

Lastly, you also need to bear in mind the globalness of your moderation team. This is because you will be receiving content from all over the world, and when content comes in from across the globe, this often means that there is also cultural subjectivism in that, which moderators from other countries might fail to catch.

Overall, a mixture of AI and human moderation is needed. Moderation in itself is subjective, and needs to be dealt with on a case by case basis. Moderation errors are inevitable. It is just a matter of how the company prepares to catch those mistakes as quickly as possible, and how they protect their moderation team.

Who decides what porn I can and cannot watch?

It’s a bit of a weird question to think about, but there is someone who is ultimately deciding what porn you can and cannot watch. And if you think about this even more you realize how much power is actually in that decision. That is why consumers really should be thinking more about this, and being vocal about it because ultimately that decision is affecting how people view not just porn but their own sex lives and desires. I often ask people, is that the content you want, or is it just the content you’ve been given? And most of us (myself included) cannot give a straight answer to that question. Crazy right …

In the case of Freyja, I had a couple of ideas when I first started about what type of content I wanted to try to eliminate, but when it came down to actually making those decisions I realized how not straightforward that is.

Firstly, you have to separate your personal bias from it. For example, I would personally not want spitting on faces in videos. But, that is a personal bias, just because that’s something I don’t like doesn’t necessarily give me the right to ban it. And so, I didn’t.

Secondly, there will always be someone that does not agree with what you ban. There will always be one performer who isn’t happy you banned one type of ‘fetish’ because that’s how they make money, and then there will always be a user who is upset that you banned their ‘fetish’. I remember when we first started I had banned needle injections in the arm. Makes sense right? Don’t really need that in porn. Well, I had a performer email me saying that this was offensive to diabetics and that I am a censorship kink shamer. So, you really can’t win them all…

Thirdly, moderation guidelines are always evolving. They should never be set in stone, because there will always be some new case that arises. A lot of moderation comes down to common sense and feeling and this is where big tech often goes wrong. You have too many big social media platforms whose moderation guidelines have been made by tech people, when in reality this is a philosophical debate, and should be a humanitarian discussion. We all need to constantly be discussing and debating these types of ‘rules’. At Freyja, we have really tried to do this. We have constant discussions with our performers and the public about our guidelines, and we listen and adjust. Another important thing, was if we do not allow a piece of content, that we have a discussion with that creator as to why. There are also cases where just by having the discussion the misunderstanding is cleared up and then you can allow the content. So, talking does go a long way. The issue for big platforms is if you don’t do this from the start it becomes a scalability and infrastructural issue.

Overall, moderation is not a straightforward thing, especially when it comes to sex and porn. For some reason as a society, a lot of us have the misconception that moderation is censorship, when it is not. However, moderation done badly can result in censorship. This is why as consumers we do need to be thinking about these things not just to evaluate the ‘ethicalness’ of the said platform, but also because this is something that directly affects our own sex lives and can influence our own fantasies, so why shouldn’t we have a say?