Cornell Law Review

The problem of Big Tech has consumed recent legal scholarship and popular discourse. We are reckoning daily with the threats that digital speech platforms like Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), TikTok, and YouTube pose to our personal and political lives. Yet while this conversation is raging in discussions about the impact of technology on democracy, free speech, personal autonomy, and other urgent social issues, there has been no parallel discussion about how technology may be distorting our sexual culture. This Article fills that gap.

Here I make a claim that no one has made in legal scholarship or in popular discourse: that the pornography industry, which has undergone a technological revolution in the last sixteen years, should now be reconceived of as a problem of Big Tech and the power of algorithmic speech platforms to shape our culture. Starting in 2007, pornography shifted to algorithm-driven tech platforms like Pornhub, almost all of which are controlled by one little-known, near-monopoly company called “Aylo” (formerly known as “MindGeek”). I argue that as Facebook, X, and YouTube are to democratic speech, Aylo/ MindGeek is to sexual speech. Like these other platforms, the company’s sites use algorithmic search engines and suggestions, rigid categorization of content, and artifcial-intelligence-driven search term optimization to constrain and warp what users are exposed to. Pornography now presents the distorting effects that accompany Big Tech speech platforms, such as filter bubbles, feedback loops, and the tendency of algorithmic suggestions to alter individual preferences.

The lack of scholarly attention to this revolution in pornography is surprising given both the extreme scope of the changes and the strong interest scholars are paying to the legal and cultural implications of other Big Tech speech platforms. But it is also striking because the question of whether pornography changes us as individuals and as a society was once hotly debated in legal scholarship. In the 1980s and 90s, these issues consumed First Amendment and feminist legal scholars who debated the feminist critique of pornography of that era. Yet as the debate has moved on, scholars have overlooked the newfound relevance of that scholarship for the Big Tech incarnation of the porn industry. Drawing on that earlier scholarship, and on emerging literature about the power of Big Tech speech platforms, I show that the problems posed by the Big Tech takeover of pornography should be of concern not only to scholars who supported the feminist critique of pornography, but also and for different reasons, to those who opposed it and left it for dead. Anyone who has a stake in sexual autonomy should worry about the threat that the Big Tech transformation of pornography now poses.

To read this Article, please click here: Arousal by Algorithm.