A lawsuit filed by more victims of the sex trafficking operation claims that Pornhub’s moderation staff ignored reports of their abuse videos.
Sixty-one additional women are suing Pornhub’s parent company, claiming that the company failed to take down videos of their abuse as part of the sex trafficking operation Girls Do Porn. They’re suing the company and its sites for sex trafficking, racketeering, conspiracy to commit racketeering, and human trafficking.
The complaint, filed on Tuesday, includes what it claims are internal emails obtained by the plaintiffs, represented by Holm Law Group, between Pornhub moderation staff. The emails allegedly show that Pornhub had only one moderator to review 700,000 potentially abusive videos, and that the company intentionally ignored repeated reports from victims in those videos.
The damages and restitution they seek amounts to more than $311,100,000. They demand a jury trial, and seek damages of $5 million per plaintiff, as well as restitution for all the money Aylo, the new name for Pornhub’s parent company, earned “marketing, selling and exploiting Plaintiffs’ videos in an amount that exceeds one hundred thousand dollars for each plaintiff.”
The plaintiffs are 61 more unnamed “Jane Doe” victims of Girls Do Porn, adding to the 60 that sued Pornhub in 2020 for similar claims.
Girls Do Porn was a federally-convicted sex trafficking ring that coerced young women into filming pornographic videos under the pretense of “modeling” gigs. In some cases, the women were violently abused. The operators told them that the videos would never appear online, so that their home communities wouldn’t find out, but they uploaded the footage to sites like Pornhub, where the videos went viral—and in many instances, destroyed their lives. Girls Do Porn was an official Pornhub content partner, with its videos frequently appearing on the front page, where they gathered millions of views.
read more: https://www.404media.co/girls-do-porn-victims-sue-pornhub-for-300-million/
Given their videos were so highly ranked, the prevalence of coercion in the industry, and the fact that it’s often impossible to tell if someone’s been threatened behind the scenes, it’s highly likely that most people reading this who have watched porn online have also watched plenty of videos of actual rapes.
This is a simple fact, but one which a lot of people would rather deny, rather than admit their part in perpetuating it, while wondering why watching porn makes them sad. Partly, I suspect, because deep down they know the truth of it.
I have never watched porn. Some would say that makes me inhuman but it can be done. Those of us with experience in the sex industry would never say ‘sex positive’.
I wonder how many products you’ve bought in your life were made by child labor.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism
Alright, get rid of your phone. And whoa, if you have an iPhone, you might as well be pushing those Foxconn employees over the edge to their death. Everyone who bought a diamond is evil too. Do you love chocolate? You monster! Children most likely collected that. Clothes? My dear boy, you are supporting the exploitation of third world poors. Did you buy cheap veggies? Bloody psycho, you might as well be standing with a gun over the hordes of immigrants picking most of those for unliveable wages. Go to the cinema, watch a video on youtube, or listen to music on spotify, or vote for a conservative? How dare you support industries that have known child molesters, wage slaves, lobby for worse living standards, donate to hate groups, and and and?
“Oh, but that’s involuntary, I need those to survive”. Do you? Do you really? Did you need to buy a new phone? Is chocolate really necessary? Why don’t you pick your own fruit? Music, video, and other pleasures aren’t necessary to survive either.
So you’re fine with the fact that you’ve almost certainly, essentially guaranteed to have, masturbated to a woman being raped? What the living fuck is wrong with you?
“Fine with” is probably too far. I think they’re pointing out that, for example, your phone contains cobalt which was likely mined unethically, perhaps by a child, perhaps resulting in their death. Is therefore buying a phone inherently wrong? Not essentially. Nor is porn inherently wrong. The abusers in these scenarios are in the wrong, not necessarily the end consumer.
It could even be argued that rather than being some sort of monster for being unknowingly subjected to footage of a sexual assault, that the viewer is also now being harmed themselves.
Furthermore, I’m not familiar with the “Girls Do Porn” channel/company/whatever but it sounds to me that the concept was porn created by women. Wether sound or not logically, the intent seemed ideally to be a safer porn environment, like reduced patriarchy flavored porn. So in this case the company responsible actively preyed on people trying to find a more consensual and equitable pornography.
There is definitely a crime here, but it isn’t the horny guy cranking away in the privacy of his home.
Its not impossible to research the porn you consume to ensure that you’re not getting off to someone being sexually abused or raped.
My cell phone is something I require to access society. I cannot work without one, I cannot be a functional adult in society without one. I go every day without masturbating to women being sexually abused, and there is no reason whatsoever someone has to do that. It’s not the same at all, and its telling that men see “Please stop masturbating knowingly to women being raped” and immediately compare doing that with unethical consumption in general. It’s not comparable. I’m sorry, there really is nothing comparable to sexually pleasing yourself to a video of a woman being sexually abused. It makes me literally sick to my stomach that so many men are clearly totally fine with doing that.
Again, the porn is not the problem. There is nothing inherently wrong with making or watching porn. The predators are the problem.
Two things to consider:
One, I guarantee you have watched and will watch again, a major Hollywood movie featuring victims of abuse by directors, producers, other actors. Even child victims. Hollywood is widely recognized for being a dark and evil place with imbalances of power and open secrets about exploitation. But watching movies is not inherently evil. The best you can do is be deliberate in your choices and try your best to not support the bad guys.
Two, where does the moral imperative end? Ok, so you’ve decided that entertainment in the form a sexual performance is fundamentally different than movies/tv/theater/music. You abstain from participating because you believe it is unethical. Do you then believe in censorship? Surely if it is categorically wrong it should be made illegal? Better safe than sorry. But who gets to control the terms of censorship? What about the woman of color who is making enough doing porn to empower themselves in a society that is essentially constructed to deprive them of power? Is it right to take away that power due, ironically, to the actions of the same type of bad guy that limits their power in the first place?
Prohibition does not work. Not for drugs, not for alcohol, not for porn, and of the three I listed it is arguably the healthiest pastime. The solution is openness and oversight. Stop forcing porn talent to exist in some walled off dim corner of the internet. Eliminate the stigma. Give me that new Netflix Original porn with credits and funding. But it still wont be perfect. But that still doesn’t make it fundamentally wrong.
Some regulation for the porn industry would be nice, how about auditors and some method of government vetting to ensure the rights of sex workers in general.
I will not consume it for many reasons, I’m a woman and porn is written and filmed to be exploitative of bodies like mine. Thats not and never is going to appeal to me. Erotica exists, drawings exist, forms of ethical sexuality exist from which I can consume.
Note that porn itself is not some godly byproduct of open-minded sexual liberation. A large portion of it is sadistic fantasy of abusing women, and I strongly question the long term impact of exposing teenage boys to content depicting women being victimized - even in a consensual context. What are the long term ramifications of hyper sexualizing women in pornography? What is the effect with regards to perception of women, with regards to the proliferation of misogyny?
And why is porn so infantile, so pseudo-pedophilic? Why all the teen shit? Why all the jailbait shit, the barely legal and so on. Am I supposed to ignore this, and pretend that the existence of this industry has no tangible impact on my life? Am I supposed to believe that the porn industry played no part in creating my rapist, in creating a culture whereby raping women is seen as desirable by men who do not empathize with women?
I think banning ogranized commercial pornography and instituting universal basic income would pretty readily solve this problem, even for the sex workers who can now choose to produce their own pornography for non-financial non-survival reasons if they want to. Anything less than that doesn’t adequately address the way this industry exploits women, both within the industry and outside of it.
I am a regular consumer of online porn. And I’ll admit, I loved their videos. Now knowing what was going on, that’s on me to do some thinking, i have probably watched a rape and helped the perpetrator make money from that act. That’s hard on the conscience. I don’t know what to think about it.
The fault lies squarely on the shoulders of the producers. You hold as much guilt for that action as anyone who has ever purchased a cell phone has for the conditions for the workers are subjected to. Which isn’t to say 0, but it’s so small that it may as well be.
Really? You don’t know how to feel about jerking off to rape? I know how to feel about you. POS.