Under increasing public and corporate pressure, Pornhub began purging millions of videos from its website this week. But activists, including a faith-based nonprofit organization, and politicians are calling for additional scrutiny and “a reckoning” for the site.
The developments came less than two weeks after New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported the adult website not only contains pornographic adult videos, but hosted — and profited from — videos of minors, sexual assault and violence, spy cameras and revenge porn from unverified users of the website.
“Amazing what public pressure will do,” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said on Twitter Monday. “Now Congress should pass my legislation that would make Pornhub liable for all content that is non-consensual or produced through fraud or coercion.”
Anti-sex trafficking and anti-pornography activists also weighed in saying that Pornhub executives should be held accountable for the alleged criminal activity on its platform.
Hawley introduced his legislation last week — the Survivors of Human Trafficking Fight Back Act — that would allow victims of rape, sex trafficking and “individuals whose intimate images are distributed without their consent” to take legal action against offending websites. Republican Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, along with New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan, are cosponsors of the bill.
The public scrutiny has led to major credit card companies — citing their own investigations into Pornhub — to ban the use of their cards to process transactions on the website.
And that change will also impact web-based sex workers, who have complained about Pornhub’s operations but rely on credit card payments to sustain their businesses.
The Times’ Pornhub column
According to Kristof’s Dec. 4 column, Pornhub “attracts 3.5 billion visits a month, more than Netflix, Yahoo or Amazon,” profits from billions of daily advertisement impressions and is one of the most visited sites on the global internet.
“Pornhub is like YouTube in that it allows members of the public to post their own videos. A great majority of the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each year probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and nonconsensual violence,” Kristof wrote. “Because it’s impossible to be sure whether a youth in a video is 14 or 18, neither Pornhub nor anyone else has a clear idea of how much content is illegal.”
Kristof’s column also includes interviews with women who allege they were sexually abused as minors and videos of the abuse have been shared on Pornhub.
On Monday evening, Kristof wrote on Twitter that he was receiving “moving notes from girls who had rape videos or naked videos of themselves on Pornhub, who were humiliated, who attempted suicide — and who can now breathe again.”
Pornhub declined an interview, according to Kristof, but said in statement that it was “unequivocally committed to combating child sexual abuse material, and has instituted a comprehensive, industry-leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate illegal material from our community.” The adult website added, Kristof wrote, “that any assertion that the company allows child videos on the site ‘is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue.’”
Activists weigh in
Kristof also cites the TraffickingHub campaign, whose name alludes to human trafficking and Pornhub, which has collected more than 2.1 million digital signatures calling for the pornographic website to “shut down and its executives held accountable.” According to TrafficingHub, the “non-religious, non-partisan” effort was founded by Laila Mickelwait and is a campaign of the nonpartisan organization Exodus Cry.
Exodus Cry, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Sacramento, California, says its “aim is to be a faith-based organization modeled on the character of Jesus.” According to the organization’s 2019 tax documents, Exodus Cry said it is “committed to abolishing sex trafficking and the commercial sex industry while assisting and empowering its victims.”
“Pornhub is predatory, exploitative and immoral in more ways than one,” said Imam Omar Suleiman — the founder and president of Yaqeen Institute of Islamic Research in Texas — in a statement on the campaign’s website. “We must form a potent coalition to stop the world’s largest trafficking industry from preying on our most vulnerable.”
Jenna Jameson, a former adult film actor, alleged that “Pornhub profits off the rape and torture of women and children,” according to a statement on TraffickingHub’s website.
Activists, like Mickelwait, said on Twitter Monday that the alleged victims of Pornhub would still be heard, regardless of the website’s video purge.
“Hitting the delete button to scrub the crime scene videos from your site doesn’t absolve you of the decade of harm you caused to countless victims whose trauma you immortalized for your own profit,” she wrote. “This is a reckoning.”
Credit card crackdown
After the Times column made public the details of Pornhub’s unverified content, credit card companies Mastercard Inc., Visa Inc. and Discover Financial Services stopped allowing its cardholders to pay for content on the website, Bloomberg reported.
“Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site,” Mastercard said in a statement to multiple news sites.
PayPal, a digital payment service that supports online money transfers, has also “cut off services” to Pornhub, according to the Times.
In a statement released to their website Sunday night, Pornhub said “the safety of our community is our top priority” and explained its policies.
“As part of our policy to ban unverified uploaders, we have now also suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or members of the Model Program,” Pornhub stated. “This means every piece of Pornhub content is from verified uploaders, a requirement that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute,”
By early Monday morning, it appeared that Pornhub was “nuking all unverified content from the website,” Vice journalist Samantha Cole wrote on Twitter.
“Before the content purge on Sunday evening, Pornhub hosted around 13.5 million videos according to the number displayed on the site’s search bar, a large number of them from unverified accounts,” according to Vice. By Monday, it appeared that the website had removed videos by the millions, with the total fluctuating from around 6 to 10 million videos purged throughout the day, Vice reported.
In its statement, Pornhub said it was being attacked not for its policies, “but because we are an adult content platform.”
But Cole reported that “non-consensual sexual imagery activists” and “performers whose work is often pirated and reposted to Pornhub” had been requesting a policy change for years.
“Sex workers are often the most vocal, constructive critics of the platforms they use,” Vice’s Cole wrote.