Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking
Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking
with Laila Mickelwait
Pornhub was once recognized as the largest and most popular porn site in the world. The site made it easy for users to upload and download content, which is desirable in other contexts. However, these features pose significant threats when applied to freely accessible user-generated, homemade pornography. Reports suggest that without adequate safeguards, there was a rapid increase in uploads of questionable, illegal, and violent content, including instances of nonconsensual sexual acts. More troublingly, such content became widely viewable and could be downloaded onto private devices. Laila Mickelwait is the author of the new book Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking. She is also the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, a non-profit organization that seeks to help bring justice to survivors of online sexual crimes. In our interview, she told us that she was a new mother when she saw precisely the toll Pornhub was taking on victims, such as suicide attempts after torment by others or navigating persistent harmful thoughts. Worst of all, in many instances, it appeared that the victims were underage.
When victims attempted to report non-consensual and illegal acts, including rape and sexual abuse of minors, Pornhub allegedly lacked effective mechanisms to respond. Reports further suggested that content could simply be re-uploaded even when removed from the site. Consequently, victims reported being repeatedly exposed to the repercussions of nonconsensual shared or illegally obtained proliferated content. Numerous lawsuits have been filed based on sex trafficking, child abuse, and RICO laws in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., with claims that Visa and two hedge funds also knowingly profited from content depicting sexual abuse.
Some content showed people as not responding or even as unconscious. Amid the countless Pornhub uploads, there were concerns that instances of violence often go unreviewed or under-reviewed by moderators, making it difficult to draw clear distinctions between legally and illegally obtained sources. Identity verification measures at its onset were severely lacking. According to Laila, the safeguards were deeply flawed due to corporate complicity, allowing illegal content to be shared and profited from.
Petition to Shut Down Pornhub
Laila began our interview by talking about her eighteen-year history of combatting sex trafficking, starting with being shocked by a documentary about child sex trafficking in Calcutta, India. “It was at a time when many people didn’t know about trafficking and modern slavery, and it was new to me for sure at the time, and I could hardly wrap my mind around the fact that innocent children were being violated in this worst way for profit,” she said. She later began to investigate the intersection between the “big porn” industry, sex trafficking, and other forms of abuse. She stated that during this period, she became aware of MindGeek’s virtual monopoly on the industry, as it owned Pornhub at the time and many of the world’s most popular porn sites and brands. It has since been renamed Aylo.
At the end of 2019, she began to hear about news stories of children and adult victims who were being trafficked or abused on Pornhub. She noted the story of Nicole Addimando, who killed her abusive partner after torture and sexual abuse was filmed by him and uploaded to Pornhub without her consent. There was also the news of a 15-year-old girl from Florida, who was missing for a year, and eventually located in 58 videos being assaulted for profit on Pornhub. Laila was haunted by the stories and decided to test the system to see how easily content could be uploaded. She noted no reliable age or consent verification, and a site infested with videos of what appeared to be real sexual crimes. In February 2020, she launched the Traffickinghub movement to hold Pornhub and its executives accountable.
Laila began with the #Traffickinghub on Twitter and then wrote an op-ed published in the Washington Examiner. She then started a petition, at the encouragement of one of her followers, to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable, which has over 2.3 million signatures today from every country in the world. As information spread about the petition, victims and whistleblowers started to come forward to expose the site, even the former owner of Pornhub. Whether persons were pro- or anti-porn, they joined together to agree that no one should be raped for profit on the world’s largest porn site.
Unmasking the Myth of a ‘Wholesome’ Porn Site
Eventually, The New York Times journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof wrote an opinion piece titled The Children of Pornhub, which brought further light to the issue. The 2020 article noted how the Pornhub site, while trying to appear wholesome, had monetized rape videos, child pornography, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynistic content, and footage of women being asphyxiated. Of note, at that time, Pornhub had escaped any responsibility in prosecutions directly linked to the site, despite profiting from them.
Nicholas also told the story of a 14-year-old girl, Serena K. Fleites, who sent a boy a naked video of herself at his request and had her life changed forever. Not only had the boy shared them with friends but had posted them on Pornhub. Despite her persuading Pornhub to take down the videos, they were soon uploaded again. According to the article, Serena began cutting herself and eventually took several pills from a medicine cabinet. When she woke still alive, she hung herself in the bathroom but was again revived. Serena reported in the article that she still struggled with her self-worth, history of addiction, employment, and housing at the time of the article when she was 19.
Suing Bad Actors and Their Enablers
Laila discussed the importance of not only lawsuits to hold Pornhub accountable but also to ensure that anyone who knowingly enabled the illegal acts also faced appropriate penalties or repercussions. She notes that credit card companies, such as Visa, have recently been sued for providing the tool to Pornhub with which to “complete the crime of knowingly benefitting from child trafficking.” Additionally, hedge funds that have funded Pornhub are also involved in litigation because it is believed that they were fully aware of what they were funding.
Laila and I went on to discuss ways to protect children from these types of dangerous portals going forward, including mandatory third-party age and consent verification policies, continued public pressure to shine a light on areas where trafficking risks are high, and continued strategic civil litigation to protect victims from their harmful products. We also discussed the need for restitution to be provided to victims.
With continued progress, Laila said that she hopes to prevent illegal content from being able to be uploaded in the first place “…because one minute is too long. A day is too long for this content to be up there when you have this kind of traffic on these sites.” Ultimately, she noted that these sites are highly motivated to comply with credit card company demands and the ability to process payments, so this may be one of the best places to apply pressures to ensure only legal and consensual content makes it to sites that distribute user-generated pornography.
Resources:
Take down: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse Rape and Sex Trafficking by Laila Mickelwait
Traffickinghub Petition - Shut Down Pornhub #Traffickinghub
Understanding Cults: A Foundational Course for Clinicians
Center for Humane Technology: How To Free Our Minds with Cult Deprogramming Expert Dr. Steven Hassan
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Ayn Rand’s Cult Leadership and Influence on the GOP and Celebrities