The Dartmouth Review’s Investigation Restores Campus Access to Pornhub.com

On September 14th, several Dartmouth students were faced with a confusing reality: Pornhub.com—a pornography site and subsidiary of pornography conglomerate MindGeek—refused to load on any campus wifi. After an unnamed student sent out a message in a Greek organization’s GroupMe, many students began to check their own internet connections. Originally, a different student had found out about this unfortunate situation during Orientation Week. After another student attempted to pull up pornhub.com to make a joke about another student’s private habits, this entire friend group realized that the website was not loading. Just like a shameful viral video, whispers of Dartmouth’s wifi shortcomings began to spread. 

In the dead of night, one of these members reached out to The Review’s resident on-call porn expert for guidance on how to proceed (no, really, she spent two years researching the subject). After a hectic twenty-four hours, two trips to the IT department, lots of weird looks, and one email to Eduroam’s international helpdesk, we are proud to report that access to Pornhub was restored in the early morning on September 17th. 

Normally, when pornography is banned, providers do so in one of two ways. First, they’ll use keywords and metadata to ban certain forms of content. The worry here is that non-pornographic websites will often be caught up in this ban. Think of the similarities between the words that one would search on a tube website and on WebMD. This phenomenon is called “overblocking” and, if you search for literature on it, you’ll find that the UK is notorious for their ill-designed overblocking bans. To avoid banning useful websites, censors often will underblock material. Think of how effective most age-verification systems work. “Are you 18+?” web-barriers do not require additional verification beyond checking a box. Underblocking can also occur when an insufficient number of terms are blocked. Think about how many different slang terms there are for “breast.” In order to ban all images and videos of breasts, you would hypothetically need to figure out what all of those slang terms are and block each one of them. As new slang terms and niche fetishes are created, sophisticated blocks become that much harder to maintain.  

The second form of porn censorship occurs when a provider decides to ban a certain website from being accessed. Normally, censors will place numerous websites with similarly explicit content on their ban list. Once again, it is difficult to maintain bans like these as new, smaller websites that provide explicit content continue to proliferate. 

Either way, when users try to access banned content, a warning of some sort tends to pop up to explain that the website is banned. No such warning popped up when individuals tried to access Pornhub on Dartmouth’s wifi. Knowing all of this information, one look at the inability of Pornhub to load very clearly showed that the website wasn’t purposefully blocked. 

To perform due diligence, we checked to see whether other MindGeek subsidiaries and non-MindGeek pornographic websites behaved in a similar way on campus’s two campus wireless networks: Eduroam and Dartmouth Public. No other explicit website had this response. After double checking  whether Pornhub was down on their own servers, we asked a representative to contact the IT department to see what was happening behind the scenes. 

She went to the IT department in the morning of the 16th and inquired as to what was happening. The IT department responded that this was an ongoing issue, and that if users switched to the Dartmouth Public network they would be able to access Pornhub. Upon hearing that Pornhub was still inaccessible, they recommended that our representative e-mail Eduroam support services. Eduroam is a tool that allows organizations to give their users access to networks while at other Eduroam institutions. Eduroam quickly responded to the inquiry and stated that they simply provide the internet protocol—institutions’ IT departments are responsible for blocks. 

With this information in hand, our representative went back to the IT department. The very helpful student staff contacted their boss and their boss put our representative in contact with the correct staff at Dartmouth’s Department of Information, Technology and Consulting. One quick e-mail later and ITC was on the case. They responded professionally and promptly with the following e-mail: 

“It appears that the IP address pornhub.com resolves to has found its way on to a dynamic block list at our WAN security tools. I’m assigning this ticket to IT Security, who curate said block list.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention.”

A mere 40 minutes later, a member of the IT Security staff responded that Pornhub was active:

“I am closing this ticket as I believe we have satisfactorily resolved this problem. If that is not the case, please feel free to open this ticket #[REDACTED] again simply by commenting on the ticket in the Dartmouth Services Portal.

Thank you for working with Information, Technology and Consulting.”

Dartmouth College at no point in this process tried to censor its students access to certain websites. They clearly and transparently explained that Pornhub had got its way on to an automated list by mistake and moved to take it off of the block list immediately. While other colleges and universities across the country like the Catholic University of America and Liberty University move to ban access to pornography and censor speech, it is refreshing to see Dartmouth actively give its students freedom to peruse media as they wish. As the majority of college students are above the age of eighteen, banning pornography on campus constitutes a paternalistic form of censorship. 

To all those who think that The Review is a waste of an organization: remember this moment. Remember when we stood up for your rights to access whatever content you want on the internet. Remember us while you bathe in your shameful afterglow, immediately after you finish a certain activity. Remember how we publicly put our dignity on the line to ensure your privacy and freedom. Next time you’re searching the internet late at night for the love you couldn’t find on frat row, know that your access to Pornhub’s alternative social space will no longer be hindered.