Content Safety Screening for Adult Tube Sites
Every adult site that imports content from other sources will eventually import something it should never show. The question is whether you catch it before your visitors, your ad network or a platform does. This guide describes the screening we run across our own sites, and the gaps we found the hard way.
This is practical advice from operating sites, not legal advice. Your obligations depend on where you and your hosting are.
What to screen for
- Youth-coded material: any suggestion that a performer is under 18, in any language, including slang, leetspeak (t33n) and ages written as numbers. Adult performers in “teen” categories exist legally, but the safest policy for anything you promote is to refuse youth framing altogether.
- Non-consensual framing: hidden cameras, voyeur, “leaked”, “caught”, “recording my friends”, drugged or sleeping scenarios, kidnapping and capture themes.
- Family roleplay: step-relatives, mom, dad, son, daughter and so on. Legal in many places, but many platforms and ad networks refuse it, and it often overlaps with youth framing.
- Real people in drawn or 3D content: animated sites should feature fictional characters only, and never characters who are canonically under 18, regardless of the art style.
- Studio names. Some studios are built on hidden-camera or family-taboo themes. A title can be clean while the studio name tells you everything.
Gates, in layers
1. At the source
Don’t build scrapers for sites whose catalogue is dominated by leaks, hidden-cam or youth-coded material. Before adding any source, sample a few hundred titles and look at the site’s own partners. If its neighbours are leak sites, so is its content.
2. At import
Run every new title through a shared rules module before it is approved, on every site, in one place. We learned this one the hard way: our gate ran on some import paths but not others, and titles slipped through the paths it didn’t cover. A rule that exists in one script and not the next is not a rule.
3. At promotion (stricter)
Anything you promote off-site (clips, upload tubes, Telegram, social media) should pass a stricter gate than your own catalogue. Promotion is public, it is judged by other platforms’ rules, and repeated removals sink accounts. Our promotion gate refuses words our site gate tolerates, such as “virgin”, “little” and family terms, plus a list of studios and of underage characters.
4. After the fact
Rules improve, and old content was imported under old rules. Re-run the gate across live content whenever you tighten it, and monitor live titles daily. When we added male counterparts to the youth rules (“young boy” and so on), the re-run found dozens of live titles that the earlier rules had missed.
Write rules carefully
- Use word boundaries and list inflections. “teen” must also catch “teenage”, and “boy” must not catch “boyfriend”.
- Numbers need context. “16 yo” is an age; “(11 min)” and “Part 14” are not. Our first rule flagged durations and series numbers until we required an age word after the number.
- Test against your real catalogue before deploying. Count how many live titles a new rule would hold and read a sample. A rule that holds 80,000 videos is probably too broad; one that holds three may be too narrow.
- Keep a list of exceptions small and reviewed by a person.
Hold, don’t delete
When a title fails, take the video offline (unpublish it, set it private, return 404) and record why. Don’t delete the file or the record. Rules have false positives, and a reversible hold lets a person review it later without re-importing anything. Keep a log of every hold with the date and the rule that caught it.
Watch the downstream copies
If several sites import from one central catalogue, a video held at the source must also come down everywhere it was copied. A daily job that takes down copies of anything rejected upstream closes that gap.
Respond quickly to reports
Publish a clear contact address and a DMCA and content-report page, answer reports promptly, and take reported content offline while you review it. A good process is the best evidence that you take this seriously.