None of those titles say rape or child in them, and the article already covered that they have a blacklist of search terms. Ever played a videogame with a censored wordlist for profanity? People will still find a way to call you a racial slur, even if it involves some really creative uses of text to get around the filter.
> Wouldn't it be better to just... not have that feature? Why isn't it an option to just turn it off?
Related searches in a search engine is a pretty core feature, and it's not like it prevents people from just coming up with related searches with their own mind and typing them in manually. And your statement sort of applies to every facet of Pornhub. Uploading user submitted videos can be actively harmful. Comments can be actively harmful.
Edit to respond to this bit:
> Changing the code is within their power, yet they don't.
I'm pretty certain it's not just taking search term and running it through a thesaurus or something like that. It likely correlates searches from users that make similar search terms. The code isn't really generating any suggestions, just aggregating correlated search terms. I don't have hard proof of this of course, but it's a very common implementation for related searches.
Deciding what is and isn't rape is an AI-hard problem.
This is a bit akin to saying that a film like reservoir dogs encourages theft, torture, and murder.
You may not like it personally, and that's perfectly reasonable, but a lot of people – men and women alike – do.
> the bit about related suggestions sort of implies to a non-techie that Pornhub employees are generating these suggestions
They are, in a sense. They're not actively doing it in person but the code they wrote is generating those suggestions. Changing the code is within their power, yet they don't. If the code processing payments accidentally started charging everyone $0 you can bet it would get fixed pretty quickly. Why not fix the code that suggests rape videos?
> The reality isn't an evil mustache-twirling Pornhub employee sitting at a desk and brainstorming "Ah yes, if they searched for ‘Young Asian’ they probably want to search for 'young tiny teen. The reality is an algorithm detecting patterns in user searches, and some of those users are sick people, and there's basically no level of human moderation of videos or search terms happening at the scale of usage Pornhub gets.
"We created a feature that can be actively harmful, but there's no way for us to moderate it. Oh well!". Wouldn't it be better to just... not have that feature? Why isn't it an option to just turn it off?