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Report: Major Porn Site Saw Massive Spike During Last Week’s Facebook and Instagram Outage

Report: Major Porn Site Saw Massive Spike During Last Week’s Facebook and Instagram Outage

Last week, Facebook and Instagram both experienced outages at the same time. While this had a major effect on many content sites (Facebook is a top referring site to many other places on the internet), one other site saw a massive spike: Pornhub, one of the internet’s largest adult websites.

From CNET: “ Traffic spiked immediately [for Pornhub] by 11 percent and then went even higher in the early evening, hitting as much as 19 percent above average.”

It’s not the first time something like this has happened. When YouTube briefly went down in October, Pornhub saw a similar major spike.

The implications are distressing: When people can’t kill time looking at social media, many almost instantly turn to pornography.

More lawmakers are calling for porn to be recognized as a public health crisis. A recent proposed resolution in Arizona says,  “pornography is a crisis leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts” adding that porn “perpetuates a sexually toxic environment that damages all areas of our society.” Twelve other states have already passed similar resolutions.

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