As more and more internet service providers in India and telcos ban access to porn sites in the country, people are turning to every avenue to scratch the porn itch. Indians are searching for porn on other videos platforms.
YouTube is clearly the most popular videos site in the world and it too has seen a huge spike in searches for porn-related terms, presumably by those who do not wish to get into the hassles of using a VPN.
By analyzing YouTube trends, we can see that the government’s expectation that people will give up porn is totally mistaken. In fact, the search for such videos in the mainstream has only risen. The frequency of searches for some of the common porn-related terms have shot up by approximately 200 percent or so over the past month, seeing a huge jump in the past 10 days, starting October 20, when the ban started trickling in, starting with Reliance Jio.
Searches on YouTube related to popular porn websites such as Pornhub and Xvideos surged by almost 400 percent. We tried 10 of the more popular search terms that we could find based on search trends on top porn websites to see how these terms have grown on Youtube over the last 30 days:
- Xvideos – 370%
- Pornhub – 357%
- Indian sex videos – 238%
- Xnxx – 227%
- Desi sex – 222%
- Porn – 204%
- Indian sex – 185%
- Mallu sex – 182%
- Sex scene – 147%
- Bollywood Sex – 144%
Yes, YouTube is not the best place to look for porn, but it’s something in the face of nothing. Secondly, this could become a bigger issue for Youtube as it does not have a very good record of keeping questionable content off its platform, which has often landed it in hot soup with privacy experts.
It’s quite evident that the porn ban which the Department of Telecommunication has asked telcos to enforce, following the orders of the Uttarakhand High Court has not had any effect on people wanting to watch porn online. Meanwhile, more informed users are taking the route of using VPN services to watch porn, easily bypassing the blocking.
How much I love Google Trends! Rise in "VPN" and "proxy" searches after the Porn Ban 🙂 pic.twitter.com/OloW6PWOke
— Rohit Awasthi (@rohitawasthi) October 26, 2018
Clearly, the Indian government needs a better solution than this feeble implementation, and perhaps the government needs to have a rethink about what exactly a porn ban can solve as people seem to be just as keen to watch these videos. It’s not exactly curing the population of its itch for porn, so perhaps it would be better to unblock these sites, and look at sex education for a solution.
