One of the world’s most popular porn sites has three weeks to audit all of its amateur content for documentation of consent, a judge in the Netherlands has ruled.
xHamster, owned by Hammy Media, was ordered to verify or remove all amateur videos showing recognizable people who live in the Netherlands, as first reported by Ars Technica. The ruling comes after the Netherlands-based Expertise Bureau for Online Child Abuse identified 10 videos where xHamster coudln’t supply proof that the uploaders gave documentation that the performers in the videos consented to appearing on the site.
Videos by VICE
The ruling will affect content showing people who live in the Netherlands, but also content featuring people all over the world, which must be restricted within the Netherlands. If the content isn’t documented or removed within three weeks, Hammy Media faces a $32,000 fine per day.
“It is a victory for the rights and privacy of victims whose nude images were published without demonstrable consent,” EOKM said in a press release to Ars Technica.
xHamster did not respond to Motherboard’s requests for comment.
In 2022, an Amsterdam court ruled that an adult website hosting videos of people without documented permission must start getting that paperwork from uploaders, or face fines. The 10 videos presented by EOKM were from 2017-2020, before this ruling, but the court ordered that it applies retroactively. Hammy Media “told the court that it had already removed all violating content that EOKM had flagged in the case and provided assurances that moderators check to ensure the uploader is the same person as the performer,” Ars Technica reported, but this wasn’t enough for the courts.
xHamster already has a process for verifying users who want to upload videos, including providing a selfie and legal identification, such as a driver’s license, along with documentation of consent from everyone who appears in the videos. Its verification practices began in 2021, after Mastercard announced that it would require “clear, unambiguous and documented consent” for all adult sites. This followed Pornhub’s own purge of millions of unverified videos in late 2020, after Mastercard, Visa, and Discover stopped processing payments to the site, citing unlawful content.
Heavier burdens on content creators and platforms to provide extensive documentation retroactively for videos has a chilling effect on their ability to earn a living and stay online. Porn sites face intense scrutiny from lawmakers and discrimination from financial institutions when it comes to identity and verification that other mainstream platforms such as Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok do not.
Despite the site’s already strong verification measures, the judge said that “it is sufficiently plausible for the time being that a large amount of footage is being made public on xhamster.com, of which it cannot be demonstrated that permission has been obtained from the persons who appear recognizable in the picture.”
The decision comes as age verification legislation for porn sites spreads within the U.S., starting with Louisiana’s decision earlier this year to require porn sites to collect identification from all visitors. Several other states are following suit, including Arkansas, which proposed a law that would require anyone in the state to provide a “digitized identification card” in order to view porn.
