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/
“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.
And your cell phone was, at least assuming you live in a developed country, most likely replaced before it was necessary. You, and I, and every other consumer, caused that cobalt mine to have to produce a little more, which caused another chain of human suffering. Now do something about it. Oh, you can’t because you’re one powerless voice going against some of the wealthiest corporations in the world. Make friends, fight together, and collectively something may change.
Thats all fine and well, but you don’t have to masturbate to women being sexually abused. At the very least you can vet the content you’re consuming to be as sure as you possibly can be that you’re not doing that. Otherwise, as I stated in another comment, you see masturbating to women being sexually abused as an acceptable consequence of consuming pornography.
Research on stuff you consume is a good habit, but most people don’t make time to check every source, even on things they use daily like a phone (or people would all buy Fairphones).
I think most sane people do not like to masturbate to something when they believe it actually causes harm. That’s why this is a news item, porn for most people is not about abuse and they are not fine with it (although I agree much content is often extremely aggressive). As for many it’s supposed to be a window of letting sexual frustration out; porn is about sex, which is one of the core drive factors of most existing species and one of the main reasons we exist today. Not everyone feels as strongly about it, but one cannot deny the human urges surrounding it.
For many people porn in general can fulfill a need, and therefore it’s quite easy for them to overlook the dark side of porn out of habit, just like eating animals is culturally acceptable to most, as well as buying the latest phone every two years while child labour is likely involved. People get their dopamine hit by different things and may look away from questionable parts. I’d figure that includes us, perhaps on different subjects.
I think we should all critically look at our own behaviour. We’re all bad and hypocrites in my perspective, but not on purpose per se. Most discussion in this topic I see is about some people trying to admit they’re confused and defending their past behaviour without wanting to give it all up and others that claim to have the moral highground while ignoring any nuance.
I think it’s good to look at ourselves and our own shortcomings. Everyone has different flaws, some might be equally morally questionable. Let’s acknowledge that and share our views. And together make sure that we strongly form a bond on that practices like in this news post will not happen again. This is a lot easier if we can understand the consumers of porn related services and work together to weed out the dark while acknowledging existing needs.
I still take great issue with the equivalence of deriving sexual pleasure from watching women being sexually abused, inadvertently or not, and me using a cell phone. As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, my cell phone I own to access society. It serves a purpose beyond child labor. I’m not deriving sexual pleasure from watching child labor or unethical companies operating. In the case of watching porn of a woman being raped and masturbating to it, the rape is the commodity you’re consuming. The rape is the thing that you’re getting off to.
So, if we are openly aware that these videos exist and that you will come across them while masturbating to porn - then you have accepted that you will masturbate to a woman being raped. It is acceptable that that happens so that you can continue to masturbate to porn. You do not have to watch porn. Porn has only existed for the last 130 years based on our present knowledge of early works. That means that only for the last 130 years have sex acts being performed on women been recorded, and thusly only for the last 130 years has deriving pleasure from a woman being raped in a video format been a possibility. The entirety of human history this has not existed and we have all gotten off just fine, many people continue to get off just fine today no porn involved. Watching porn is a choice, it is a want and not a need. You have to accept that you will get off to sexual abuse at some point in order to continue to consume it. That shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone who has any actual empathy for women. In essence the least that someone could say is they will go as far out of their way as possible to only consume content they are absolutely certain is not depicting sexual abuse. If you’re not researching the actors you watch, the studio that produced it, the film crew that worked on it, then you’re openly accepting that youre going to get off to porn depicting sexual abuse and that it’s okay for that to happen and not worth going to every length possible to ensure it doesn’t.
It’s just telling again and again that men see “inadvertently masturbating to a woman being raped” as equivalent in some manner to “using a cell phone who’s resources were gathered unethically”. And somehow the nuance that owning a cell phone for other reasons is not the same as consuming rape porn. It isn’t, no matter how hard you try to frame it that way it isn’t and never will be. Just to reiterate, so that we hopefully don’t go in circles on the same point again, in the example of the cell phone the child labor or unethical business practices is not what I am consuming. In the example of accidentally getting off to a woman being raped the rape itself is what is being consumed, a direct video of that sexual abuse is the commodity that is being consumed.
Its not impossible to research the porn you consume to ensure that you’re not getting off to someone being sexually abused or raped.
You do understand that abusers can lie about what they’re doing, right? And that victims of abuse will often not come out in fear of retaliation from the abuser. You’re saying that the viewer should be required to prove that something doesn’t exist. It’s an impossible task.
You can do the best you can, check actresses pages check out studios research film crew. You can do a lot to try and determine whether the content you’re consuming was consensually filmed or not.
Can you ever be 100% sure? No, you can’t. And that’s why I do not watch it and never will.
