The year 2020 came with a lot of surprises, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic which created a lot of changes, even in the porn industry.

With lockdown measures and lots of idle time to spend, the porn industry witnessed an exponential increase in consumption. According to PornHub, the world’s largest adult website, there was a 12 per cent increase in traffic during the lockdown which begun around March, than on regular days—and the numbers kept climbing.

Also, due to how unpredictable the year 2020 was, there were equally relatively new interests and porn-related searches. “Among Us porn” searches had an over 2,000 per cent increase from the previous year due to a growth in the number of gamers who participated in the online multiplayer game, according to Google Trends. “TikTok porn” was another search term than grew by over 1,000 per cent following the astronomical increase in usage of the short video clips platform, with “Addison Rae porn” being an unlikely search term too.

Addison Rae, 20, is a young TikTok user who has amassed over 70 million followers since joining the platform in July 2019 and despite not making any adult content, lots of people seemed interested in viewing explicit content of her.

Another unlikely term that went from literally being non-existent in April, to becoming increasingly popular in the first few weeks in June was “Black Lives Matter Porn” and “BLM Porn”. After the killing of Black-American George Floyd by police officers sparked a country-wide protest, interest in more unusual pornographic content begun to rise.

Anime porn is another adult genre that has been on a steady climb this year. Though animated pornography can be dated as far back as the beginning of pornographic movies, the evolution of technology has improved the anime porn experience. Anime porn creates fantasy worlds based off our imagination and involves aliens, bestiality, exaggerated versions of humans, exaggerated sex organs, non-humans, lolicon—an anime theme that involves attraction to underage girls—bestiality, popular cartoon characters and many more.

While censorship and antitrust concerns continue to grow across all industries in the U.S., surprisingly, the adult industry seems to have escaped the same intense level of scrutiny on other industries by lawmakers who are bent on banning unethical content. However, the growing complacency in the adult industry is becoming quite noticeable.

Financial technology giants, MasterCard and Visa recently announced that they would ban the use of their debit or credit cards on PornHub. This was after New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a detailed exposé on the adult website harbouring exploitative content that includes child rape, racism, revenge porn and underage sex.

Almost seven million adult content are posted on Pornhub every year, and while most of the videos uploaded on the site depict consensual sexual activity, many of them do not, wrote Mr. Kristof. He revealed that videos of underaged girls who were victims of abuse and sex trafficking were also found on the website.

“In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them,” wrote Mr. Kristof in the exposé.

PornHub in response to the allegations expressed disappointment in the measures taken by MasterCard and Visa and noted that they were making major changes on the platform to prevent the spread of non-consensual adult content. They intend to include a verification method for users before they can upload content, with the new process to begin in the coming year.

The 1996 Communications Decency Act was the first bill passed by lawmakers in the U.S. that attempted to regulate pornographic content on the internet, in a bid to prevent minors from accessing adult content online. However, Section 230 of that bill instead protected tech platforms from being responsible for the content published by users on their platform and allows them to remove content based on their discretion.

Nonetheless, tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Google continue to face intense scrutiny based on how they regulate content on their platform but surprisingly, adult content websites have faced far less scrutiny by lawmakers.

Beyond the problem of illegal content, porn habits on adult platforms have equally changed. While most people are quite private with their individual preferences when it comes to adult content, the data collected by these porn sites are still quite revealing. The top five adult search terms in the U.S. according to PornHub includes ‘lesbian’, ‘hentai’, ‘ebony’, ‘Asian’ and ‘Latina’, showing consumer’s preferences for interracial porn and fetishes.

Controlling pornographic content is quite difficult as it is rooted in an individual’s sexual preferences, however, these adult websites can continue to make efforts to ensure that exploitative videos are properly moderated.