MONTREAL – For modern porn fans, User-Generated Content (“UGC”) has been a godsend. UGC is the lifeblood not just of adult tube sites, but YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and countless other sites and platforms to which creative individuals have uploaded their homemade videos, memes, animated gifs and inventive combinations of emojis.
What really blows my mind, though, is how similar to well-known, professionally-produced, duly-copyrighted content some of this UGC has become. Some of it is so convincing, in fact, it’s fooling Hollywood actors and mainstream journalists from major publications into thinking it’s stuff they’ve seen before.
Quartz is convinced, for example, people are using Pornhub to stream “Hamilton” and “Zootopia.”
“Where YouTube has been fighting for years to keep pornography off its site, PornHub now finds itself in the position of having to purge its platform of videos that are decidedly safe for work,” writes Ashley Rodriguez.
No way! This is one wild claim, obviously, but it’s one I know can’t be true, because everybody knows Pornhub is a UGC site. And while I suppose it’s possible Lin-Manuel Miranda is a Pornhub user, he’s got enough marketing savvy that if he uploaded Hamilton to get ‘mad views’ for his long-running Broadway show, I’m quite sure he’d have issued a press release to mark the occasion.
Plus, what sense would it make to upload only the first act of the show? Among other things, this would result in the viewer missing – ironically enough – the song “What’d I Miss?”
Rodriguez isn’t the only one who has been fooled by the verisimilitude skills (excuse me, skillz) of Pornhub users, of course. Actor Kumail Nanjiani has somehow become convinced his movie The Big Sick is on the site as well, allegedly categorized under “interracial.”
Then again, maybe Nanjiani is perfectly aware the video in question is just very Hollywood-like UGC, because when Pornhub tweeted at Nanjiani to let him know they were looking for this purported illicit copy of his film, the actor instructed them to not take it down.
“Oh no. Oh. Oh no,” Nanjiani tweeted back at Pornhub. “I didn’t mean it should be removed! Enjoy your Christmas! You’ve brought joy to so many people! You deserve this break!”
Look, any tweet which includes that many exclamation marks has got to be sarcastic. Nobody gets that excited about the notion of some Pornhub social media lackey having a nice Christmas, especially someone whose expensively-crafted, recent, major film release is allegedly being distributed illegally on a porn site. Clearly, Nanjiani is pulling Pornhub’s third leg.
To be fair to Rodriguez and Nanjiani, I haven’t taken the time to browse the immense depths of Pornhub to confirm my assumption the rumors of these mainstream works being there are false.
For that matter, when it comes to Zootopia, given the porn context, just in case the video in question involves a whole different sort of “zoo” theme, I’m going to take Quartz’s word for it there’s such a video on the site. The last thing I need is a surprise holiday-season raid by the FBI when I’m in the middle of making a batch of my famous Pecan-Peyote Pralines for my upcoming Hunter S. Thompson-themed New Year’s party.
Besides, there’s no need for me to look. I take it as an article of absolute, unshakeable faith that user-generated content means exactly what is sounds like it means: Things like videos of caniforms being hit in the balls by straps.
