REVEALED: Pornhub's parent company ‘manipulates data’, hires psychologists to 'make banks happy': report

Aylo, the company that owns Pornhub as well as a variety of other adult entertainment websites, apparently hires psychologists who interpret data to ensure banks who raise potential concerns regarding their partnership with the platforms are "happy."

The revelations were spilled in June by Dillon Rice, a senior script writer at Aylo, during a conversation with an undercover journalist working for Sound Investigations.

"There was legitimately like child porn on [Pornhub]?" the journalist asked. "Did Visa and Mastercard care?"

Rice said regardless of what happens the credit card companies always come back because "they want to make that f*cking money," lamenting the fact that "a bunch of dudes in a boardroom" at the credit card companies "essentially decide what society deems acceptable or not."

He explained that at the end of the day, the banks simply want "plausible deniability," and "don't want to get involved" in controversies.

When asked why the psychologists were hired by Visa and Mastercard, Rice said they were "just worried about being blamed ... if something goes wrong."

"They just want reassurance that ... if they were in a news story, they could point to something and be like 'oh we have research' or 'we have data that shows that these things are positive."

The journalist asked Rice whether he trusted the data being shared by the psychologists at Mindgeek and the credit card companies, to which he said that he didn't, citing the fact that having some research training himself, he knew all too well how easy it was to manipulate data.

"You can interpret it any way you want," he added, going over a potential example regarding the ages of Pornhub users.

"[If] we had a lot of data saying 12-year-olds were viewing it, I could argue that either that's normal because there's more kids on the internet these days so there's always gonna increase; I could say it's abnormal because we didn't used to have that 10 years ago."

He went on to explain that as a result, the reason Pornhub and other adult entertainment sites have ethics regulations "is not because we're trying to improve society," but so "Visa and Mastercard don't get mad," adding, "90% of our stuff is to make them happy."