‘The Children of Pornhub’: the hidden story behind the world’s biggest porn site
By Rebeca Crespo*
Pornhub is the number one pornography website in the world. It receives 130 million visits daily, and its ads move billions a year.
A documentary has delved into its history, which a New York journalist began to uncover in 2020, and that has less light than shadows.
Pornhub’s history gathers the testimony of different web workers and highlights a turning point in the trajectory of the web: the implementation of the ModelHub business.
This plan eliminated the obligation to have a verified account to upload porn content to the website and monetize it and opened the possibility that anyone could upload pornographic videos to the platform anonymously, claiming that the law does not require them to be responsible for what others upload.
(Money Shot: The Pornhub Story | Official Trailer | Netflix)
As it became known later, since the verification ceased to be mandatory, hundreds of videos of sexual abuse, rape, or even of minors were uploaded to the network.
Pornhub looked the other way.
In 2020, The New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof’s opinion piece uncovered the scandal.
Pornhub was hosting thousands of pedophile videos uploaded by anonymous users and making money from them.
In the article, Kristof referred to specific cases, such as that of a 16-year-old girl in Florida who, after running away from home and disappearing for almost a year, was found by her mother in Pornhub videos.
Or that of another California boy who was sexually assaulted and repeatedly assaulted by a family member who uploaded the abuse video to Pornhub until a victim’s classmate saw it on the web.
“In each case, the offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub shirked responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them,” Kristof charged at the time.
“Unlike YouTube, Pornhub allows videos to be downloaded directly from its website.”
“Therefore, even if a rape video is removed at the request of the authorities, it may already be too late: the video lives on as it is shared with others or uploaded repeatedly,” he detailed.
The scandal, along with viral protests by anti-sex trafficking groups, prompted MasterCard and Visa to pull out of Pornhub under pressure and caused the subscription and payment model to falter.
The site also decided to remove 80% of its content by 2021-a total of 10 million videos-and changed its business model.
The scandal also triggered the creation of petitions seeking to shut down the site for good, such as Traffickinghub.
“It is a decentralized global movement of individuals, survivors, organizations, and advocates from a broad spectrum of political, religious and non-religious, economic and ideological backgrounds.”
“All united for the sole purpose of shutting down Pornhub and holding its executives accountable for enabling, distributing, and profiting from rape, child abuse, sex trafficking, and criminal image-based sexual abuse,” explains founder Laila Mickelwait.
Mickelwait says that despite billions of dollars, Pornhub has not implemented an age verification or consent system.
“It generates millions in advertising and membership revenue with 42 billion views and 6 million videos uploaded annually.”
“However, it does not have a system to reliably verify the age or consent of people appearing in the pornographic content it hosts and profits from.”
One of the most searched terms on Pornhub is “teen” pornography; it has been one of the top ten search terms on the site for six consecutive years.
“Searching will yield videos constantly added faster than anyone could watch them.”
“Many feature girls who look 13 at best: girls with braces, pigtails, flat chests, no makeup, extremely young faces, holding teddy bears and licking lollipops, all while being aggressively penetrated,” Mickelwait says.
In 2020, Internet Watch Foundation certified what Traffickinghub and others had reported earlier and determined that they had found 118 child sex abuse videos on Pornhub between January 2017 and October 2019.
“What all this means is that, at this very moment, there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of videos of child sex trafficking victims on Pornhub.
“We already have proof, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Mickelwait says on his official website, where he has opened an official petition to shut down the porn site that more than two million people have already signed.
Coinciding with the premiere of the documentary on Netflix, MindGeek, which faces 7 major lawsuits and is being investigated for child sex abuse, sex trafficking, and other illegal activities, has been acquired by a Canadian venture capital firm called Ethical Capital Partners for an undisclosed amount.
The company’s future is now in the air, although, according to SimilarWeb, it remains the 12th most visited website worldwide as of February 2023.
*Journalist. Editor at La Gaceta de la Iberosfera. Contributor to Estado de Alarma TV, El Toro TV and Decisión Radio. Twitter: @rebecacrespo
With information from LGI
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