Takedown

1

The Discovery

If the woman never, uh, really . . . cried . . . too much. . . ." The man halts as he collects his thoughts, and then continues in Greek-accented English. "Uh, it's a weird thing to say: We wouldn't consider it rape . . . At the end of the day we just had to guess if it was rape or not."

There was a lot of guessing in his former job as one of Pornhub's content moderators. For three years he had been employed by MindGeek, the company that owned Pornhub, to guess about consent in videos, and to guess about the ages of people whose most intimate-or traumatic-moments lived on their site. Was she eighteen or sixteen? A petite nineteen-year-old dressed as a fourteen-year-old, with pigtails and a teddy bear? "No one really likes to watch children suffering. We just had to review them, get past them, and finish the video and go to the next one. If we stopped to think about it, we wouldn't get anything else done."

Regretful of the work he had done, this moderator reached out in the summer of 2020 to tell me what it had been like to work for MindGeek and Pornhub. He had been one of only thirty moderators working ten at a time, on eight-hour shifts, tasked with viewing a thousand or more user-uploaded videos per shift. If they viewed fewer than seven hundred, they would be reprimanded by management.

"Our process of reviewing every video was to fast-forward through them with the audio shut off, so it was muted. . . . So that was a flaw in our system." Using that system, you can't hear genuine cries for mercy or see the terror and pain in a child's eyes.

And in cases when a content moderator couldn't tell how old someone was? "They wouldn't really care. They would just pass it and it would be okay. It's more money for the site anyway," he said.

"The lines of consensual to nonconsensual are often very blurry in porn," the moderator told me. "So, for us, it was very hard for us to make that distinction."

It's impossible when your employer doesn't want you asking too many questions.

Before my conversation with that moderator, a man in Alabama named Rocky Shay Franklin drugged, overpowered, and repeatedly raped a 12-year-old boy. Franklin filmed the assaults and uploaded twenty-three of the rape videos to Pornhub. The videos were monetized with advertisements and sold as pay-to-download content. Pornhub and Franklin split the profits from the sale of each video. Franklin was sentenced to forty years in prison for what he did.

The court documents detailed how before Franklin was sentenced, police reached out to Pornhub multiple times to get the assault videos taken down but were ignored. The videos were finally removed after seven months and multiple demands by police. By then the rapes had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and downloaded, guaranteeing the child's trauma could live online forever.

When this story begins, I had yet to learn these details, but I did know about crying children. You could even say that my battle against Pornhub unexpectedly started because I was pulled out of bed one night by my own baby's tears.


In the dark hours before dawn on February 1, 2020, my baby’s piercing scream startles me awake for the fourth time that night. I collect Jed from the bassinet beside my bed, wanting to comfort him but knowing any success will be fleeting. I feel powerless, battered, and drained-I’m afraid of how long this might go on. Three months ago Jed had an emergency birth complication called shoulder dystocia. He survived without permanent damage, but he hasn’t stopped crying for more than a few hours at a time since birth and I’m at the end of my rope.

In a different season of my life I would have prayed for God to heal Jed's pain, but since my dad's sudden death I stopped believing that God cares about human affairs or even hears when we call for help.

I am disillusioned, not only with my faith but also with my anti-trafficking work.

I have spent thirteen years trying to make a difference, with no real progress. I fought for seven years to pass a sex trafficking prevention bill in the US Congress that could have an impact on trafficking worldwide, but it faced endless roadblocks and ultimately failed. I traveled country to country screening a documentary about sex trafficking to audiences of thousands around the world. Each time I would watch them weep as victims told their stories, but most wiped their eyes when it was over and never thought much about it again. I don't fault them; people feel compassion for victims but don't know what they can do to help in a meaningful way. Honestly, at this point neither do I.

Year after year, I'd witnessed sex trafficking getting worse despite everyone's best efforts to stop it. Among activists and their allies, there is a collective discouragement about the possibility of holding perpetrators accountable at scale, bringing justice to victims, and preventing abuse in the future. Even though I'm discouraged, I can't bring myself to quit. My advocacy work is the only thing keeping me sane. It's my distraction from the repeat cycle of crying and chaos. So I continue.

My informal maternity leave has ended, and I am working from home part-time, on an hourly basis for the anti-trafficking organization Exodus Cry. I know how fortunate I am to have this arrangement. And how fortunate I am that we don't need my income; my husband, Joel, and I have been married for twelve years and he provides for me, Jed, and our three-year-old daughter, Lily Rose. Though round-the-clock nursing practically immobilizes me, at least I can still research and post online while I hold my phone in one hand and keep Jed supported in my other arm.

Tonight, as I rock Jed in the darkness of my bedroom, I turn once again to thinking about this work. I remember a story I read nine days after he was born-a story I keep coming back to. A fifteen-year-old girl from Broward County, Florida, was missing for a year. She was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped off by a Pornhub user that he recognized her daughter on the site. The mother found fifty-eight videos of her child being raped on Pornhub that were uploaded by an account named "Daddy's_Slut."

Her daughter's filmed assaults were being monetized with advertisements and offered as pay-to-download content to 130 million daily site visitors. This meant users could download, possess, and reupload the videos again and again across the internet for the rest of the girl's life.

The girl's mother notified the police, who matched the perpetrator in the videos with surveillance footage from a 7-Eleven convenience store and identified him as thirty-year-old Christopher Johnson. When the police rescued the girl from his apartment, she told them he filmed the videos inside the apartment and also impregnated her.

It's hard for me to believe Johnson was only charged with lewd and lascivious battery and Pornhub is facing no consequences. I'm frustrated by the fact that there is nothing I can do about it besides share the news article on social media.

Each time I think about the story it strikes me that this young teen's abuse videos would have been side by side with a sea of similar-looking content on Pornhub. I know from my advocacy work and Pornhub's own press statements that one of the most-searched terms on Pornhub is "teen." A quick search for the word "teen" turns up titles such as "Young Girl Tricked," "Innocent Brace Faced Tiny Teen Fucked," "Tiny Petite Thai Teen," "Teen Little Girl First Time," and on and on ad infinitum. Many of their videos feature girls who look thirteen years old at best-girls with braces, pigtails, flat chests, no makeup, and young faces, holding teddy bears and licking lollipops, all while being penetrated. Pornhub claims such videos are "legal" and "consensual" content made to satisfy "various user fantasies." They are saying these are merely adult actresses made to look like underage teens and everyone seems to believe them.

And it isn't just this victim's story that has been bothering me lately.

I have been heartbroken by a criminal case in the news about a mother of two small children, like me. Her name is Nicole Addimando and she is being sentenced to life in prison in New York for killing the man who repeatedly sexually tortured her, filmed it, and uploaded the abuse to Pornhub.

Then there is the GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking operation out of San Diego, California, that has been getting headlines. The trafficking ring tricked, coerced, and forced over one hundred women into sex videos that were uploaded to one of Pornhub's most popular "partner channels" and viewed over 600 million times on the site. Twenty-two of the victims won a civil trial against GirlsDoPorn, which led to criminal convictions. The ringleader fled the country and is on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List. Pornhub is somehow escaping any consequences for what happened.

It isn't only underage teens and adult victims on Pornhub that have recently ended up in the news. A few weeks ago I read an investigation in the London Sunday Times, "Unilever and Heinz Pay for Ads on Pornhub, the World's Biggest Porn Site," which revealed that dozens of illegal videos were found on the site within minutes, some of children as young as three years old.

Shortly after, Pornhub's spokesman repeated his company's same canned line about how horrific child abuse is, followed by their standard deflection: "Oftentimes videos described as 'hidden camera footage' or 'young teen' are in fact legal, consensual videos that are produced to cater to various user fantasies. They are in fact protected by various freedom of speech laws."

I noticed his choice of the word "oftentimes."

Pornhub has been claiming they don't tolerate criminal material on their site, and these are actors and actresses pretending. But do they really check the millions of videos and images on their site to make sure they're of consenting adults? With 6.8 million videos uploaded each year, how could they?

The idea that Pornhub properly vets these videos for the age and consent of their subjects is an assumption I'm making along with hundreds of millions of other people. Perhaps it's because Pornhub has done an effective job of presenting themselves to the world as a mainstream brand. People wear their apparel proudly in public and Pornhub even has a philanthropic arm called "Pornhub Cares." With massively marketed PR campaigns to save the oceans, save the giant pandas, save the bees, plant trees, and even donate to breast cancer research, Pornhub sends the message that they care about health and safety. Besides this, millions of people each year go through the process of uploading content to Pornhub and no one has sounded any noticeable alarms about the process. Everyone, myself included, has assumed it's fine.

Jed has finally settled down and as I hold him in my arms pondering all this, a phrase my father used to say comes to mind.

"Assumption is the mother of all screwups."

His wise words resonate. If the assumption is wrong, it would certainly be the mother of all screwups for advocates like me who would have let it go unnoticed.

Suddenly I have an idea. I am going to upload content to the site myself to see what it takes and how the videos are screened.

I'm going to test Pornhub.


I lay a sleeping Jed in the center of the bed and sink back into the recliner with my laptop and phone. I get my wallet ready in case I need my driver’s license as ID, and I begin typing in my browser’s navigation bar: Pornhub.com.

On the left side of the dark page, its categories are listed: "Amateur," "Anal," "Arab," "Asian," "Babe," "Babysitter" . . . going down further: "Old/Young," "Party," "Pissing," "Public" . . . "Rough Sex," "School," "Small Tits." Then, the category with the most sex trafficking implications: "Teen."

I click the "Sign up" button and enter an email address. They want a username and password. Next, I'm directed to confirm my email address by clicking a link. Done. I wait for the site to verify my identity.

Nothing.

That was too easy.

If I'm a child abuser or sex trafficker, what are the checks on uploading videos and images of my victims?

I find the "Upload" button, click, and just like that I'm instructed to choose a file.

I take a video of the rug in the dark room and my computer keyboard. I go to upload the video and they prompt me to click a box with fine-print legal jargon that I don't bother to read, and neither does anyone else. The file is accepted. I glance at my wallet sitting on the desk beside me. The next step must be entering some kind of ID. Maybe there is a consent form?

Nope. There is no other prompt for anything else.

I'm not asked for an ID to prove that I'm over eighteen, or that the subject of the video I've uploaded is not a child. Neither am I asked for any documentation of consent pertaining to the people in the video, to ensure they are not victims of rape, trafficking, assault, or revenge porn.

No form. No check.

Moments later, an email notification pops up. It's a message from Pornhub.

"Congratulations! Your video is now live!"

The email has a URL linking to the file I uploaded minutes earlier, which is now available to the five million visitors on Pornhub in that hour alone. Congratulations? What if the video was of a fourteen-year-old being raped? It would be live on the site right now for anyone to download for free and recirculate.

I look at the Pornhub search bar to see the number of videos on the site today: 10,758,054.

Almost eleven million videos are available this day along with forty million images, presumably acquired through the same nonprocess I just went through. And that is just what is on the site today. Pornhub has a vast library of content amassed on their servers since its creation in 2007.

If Pornhub isn't verifying age or consent, how many of these eleven million videos are of real sexual assaults? How many are of children? I realize Pornhub's servers are potentially the largest collection of child sex trafficking and rape in North America, if not the world.

The world's largest porn site is likely infested with real sexual crime.

The site is set up to enable abuse. Does anyone besides me realize this? How come none of the millions of other Pornhub uploaders have said anything about it? How could I have not thought of testing the upload process sooner?