On the strength of a multimillion-dollar settlement, the state of Utah and the Federal Trade Commission are holding the world’s largest porn sites accountable.
The Utah Department of Commerce’s Division of Consumer Protection, represented by the Office of the Utah Attorney General, and the FTC, announced on Wednesday a joint consent order with Aylo, a Canada-based company that owns some of the world’s most visited adult content sites, including Pornhub, Redtube, and more than 100 other pornographic video and photo websites.
The order alleges that since 2012, Aylo has profited from child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual material (NCM) and ignored hundreds of warnings that such content was being uploaded and shared on its sites, while simultaneously deceiving the public through marketing campaigns into believing their websites didn’t contain the graphic material.
“All of this adds up to a portrait of a company that has had no intention to comply with its own policies, even when called out by credit card companies, journalists and just a general public outcry,” Margaret Busse, executive director of Utah’s Department of Commerce, said during a press conference at the state Capitol on Wednesday.
“Why were they doing this? Unprecedented profits? Yes, but in reading the complaint, it’s hard to see anything else that this company seems to relish (more than) spreading this kind of content for its own sake,” Busse added.
Aylo has agreed to pay a $5 million penalty up front for its “deceptive” business practices, and for the next 10 years, a third-party auditor will review the company every two years to ensure accountability. If Aylo violates the order requirements, the company will be subject to a $10 million fine.
“We are trying to force change in an industry that has been long overdue for change,” Utah Attorney General Derek Brown told the Deseret News. And because they’re one of the largest players in the market, Brown hopes smaller players will see and implement the same policies to avoid retribution.
Utah has some of the strictest laws in the nation against porn sites, so much so that both the companies in the complaint — Pornhub and Redtube — have blocked Utah IP addresses from accessing their content because they are unwilling to comply with the state’s legislation.
Through state leadership collaboration, Utah is guiding the nation in this work to protect the most vulnerable. And for Brown, it’s personal.
“I have four kids, and I think about this all the time,” he said. “Everything I do has to have an eye toward the next generation of Utahns, and that next generation is our kids, and they are growing and developing and living in a world that’s unlike anything that we’ve ever seen and anything that their parents have experienced.”
“I hope today’s message sends an important signal to the industry,” Brown added. “If you think you can distribute CSAM and profit by exploiting our children” and “that you can distribute NCM and profit by exploiting people in that manner, think again. We will find you and we will hold you accountable.”
The ugly truth behind Pornhub’s popularity
As of November 2024, Pornhub was the seventh most visited website worldwide by unique visitors, surpassing TikTok.com and Amazon, per Statista, averaging 930 million visitors a month.
In the complaint, Aylo was accused of encouraging CSAM and NCM material through published channels with titles like “helpless boys,” “helpless teens,” “internet creeper,” “shower spy cameras,” ultimately insinuating that minors were involved in the content.
Until the end of 2020, any person could upload videos and photos to Aylo’s tube sites without verification of identity, age or consent of the uploader or any party involved. It was also free viewing and download, so “consumers uploaded millions of videos and photos to the Tube Sites each year, including tens of thousands of CSAM and NCM videos and photos,” per the complaint.
The repercussion of an op-ed written in The New York Times, titled “The Children of Pornhub,” pushed the porn sites to make their upload accessibility more restrictive.
“The conduct we described in the complaint is truly horrific,“ FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak said during the press conference, ”One of Aylo’s employees referred to Pornhub as a gold mine for rape content.”
“The harm that Aylo companies caused is evident,” Holyoak continued. “The children and non-consenting adults included in the content that the Aylo companies distributed were violated and injured in the most horrific of ways, (and) the distribution of child sex abuse material and nonconsensual material revictimizes the individuals who were abused in the creation of that content.”
The consent order will ensure that all material already on the websites and future uploads will be reviewed and taken down if nonconsensual or containing a child.