By Doug Mainwaring
There is a backlog of about five months between when a user reports a video and an authorized team leader reviews it to determine whether to remove it, allowing the video to remain available on the Pornhub site for download and redistribution for nearly a half year after the complaint was first reviewed.
A man who as a 12-year-old boy was drugged and raped in nearly two dozen videos that were uploaded to Pornhub by his victimizer for monetary gain is suing the massive online pornography leviathan for breaking child sex trafficking and RICO laws.
According to the world’s leading anti-porn activist Laila Mickelwait, “His jury trial could put Pornhub out of business.”
In recent years, scandal-plagued Pornhub — and its shadowy parent company, Mindgeek, which recently changed its name to “Aylo” to escape its “scandal-ridden smut empire” reputation — has come under fire for posting child sexual exploitation material, sexual trafficking, and assault videos and then ignoring victim’s pleas to remove the videos from their website.
The predator who admitted that in the summer of 2018 he used, induced, and enticed the young boy and another minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing video pornography is now behind bars serving a 40-year sentence for “sexual exploitation of a child, advertising child pornography, and distribution of child pornography.”
However, Mindgeek and Pornhub have yet to face their young accuser for enabling the public distribution of the videos.
According to the lawsuit, videos of the boy’s molestation “astonishingly” generated nearly 200,000 video views, and as a result of Mindgeek’s actions and/or inactions, the now-young man “has suffered incomprehensible past and present physical, emotional, and mental trauma.”
“MindGeek knows that there is a demand for CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) on their sites and they cater to this demand,” according to the 78-page legal complaint filed in a U.S. District Court in Alabama where the sexual exploitation of the minors took place.
Hundreds of thousands of ‘teen’ sex video titles available
The case asserts that Mindgeek has historically sought to maximize profit, aggressively promoting child porn via titles and video descriptions that would more easily direct Google users to the exploitative videos featured on Pornhub.
“Many of the tags, categories, and search suggestions that have been created or edited by MindGeek facilitate users seeking easy access to child pornography, child sex trafficking, or any other form of child sexual abuse material, including that depicting” the then-12-year-old victim, cited in the complaint as CV1, in order to protect his identity.
“One such tag MindGeek used to classify pornographic content on its websites was ‘Teen.’ The suggested terms include ‘abused teen,’ ‘crying teen,’ ‘extra small petite teen,’ and ‘Middle School Girls,’” the legal complaint explains.
“In 2018, the word ‘teen’ was the seventh most searched term on all of Pornhub,” the complaint notes. “Other eponymous search terms, including ‘rape,’ ‘preteen,’ ‘pedophilia,’ ‘underage rape,’ and ‘extra small teens’ would call up videos depicting the same.”
The proliferation of these keywords and tags on the website ensures that when outside users Google these terms, Pornhub, or another MindGeek website, will be among the top results. This draws new users, even those searching the internet for illegal content, to MindGeek websites.
MindGeek’s aggressive data collection and traffic analytics mean that MindGeek knows exactly what users are looking for (and what exists) on their sites and that this includes sex trafficking material and CSAM.
For example, as The New York Times recently reported, as of December 4, 2020, a search for “girl under18” led to more than 100,000 videos. And a search for “14yo” led to more than 100,000 videos and “13yo” led to approximately 155,000 videos. MindGeek sought to capitalize on such traffic by allowing illegal search terms, creating suggested search terms, keywords, and tags
Purposefully failing to censor criminal child/teen porn videos
The case notes that while Mindgeek-Pornhub does have online moderators who review complaints about videos on the site, the 10 moderators “have no prior training, medical or otherwise, to identify whether someone depicted in a pornographic video is a child” and are, by design, set up to fail at their task.
The ten individuals on the “moderation/formatting team” were each tasked by MindGeek to review approximately 800-900 pornographic videos per 8-hour shift, or about 100 videos per hour. According to Pornhub, there are approximately 18,000 videos uploaded daily, with an average length of approximately 11 minutes per video. Hence, each moderator is tasked with reviewing approximately 1,100 minutes of video each hour. This is an impossible task, and MindGeek knows that.
To compensate for and accomplish the impossible task, moderators/formatters fast-forward and skip through videos, often with the sound turned down. The problem is not resources: MindGeek’s annual revenues are at least $500 million, and it could certainly hire and train more true moderators.
One of the most disturbing assertions in the case is that “When minor victims of sex trafficking and their representatives have contacted MindGeek to remove videos of them from its websites, MindGeek has refused to do so.”
In some cases, MindGeek moderators/formatters even looked at video comments, deleted those noting a video constituted child pornography or otherwise should be removed from the system, and left the video up.
The MindGeek moderators/formatters are discouraged from removing illegal content for particularly profitable users. Generally, when an uploader has a history of highly viewed content, the employees are only permitted to send warning letters about illegal or inappropriate content.
There is a backlog of about five months between when a user reports a video and an authorized team leader reviews it to determine whether to remove it, allowing the video to remain available on the Pornhub site for download and redistribution for nearly a half year after the complaint was first reviewed.
The videos that the boy’s victimizer uploaded to Pornhub bore “disturbing titles that clearly suggested the child depicted was a minor, including but not limited to: ‘(Had sex with) my Step Nephew’; ‘Taking Teen Virginity’; ‘My sweet little nephew.’ The other 20 video titles are too crude and obscene for LifeSiteNews to cite.
Despite those titles and the content of the videos, Mindgeek “never informed the authorities about the identity of the child sexual predator, the fact he posed child sexual violence, or the fact that child sexual violence was being utilized on their platforms for profit to their mutual benefit.”
At no time did the MindGeek Defendants attempt to verify CV1’s identity or age, inquire about their status as minor children, victims of sex trafficking, or otherwise use their platform to root out the trafficking of their images. Instead, the MindGeek Defendants continued to disseminate these images around the world for profit even after law enforcement informed the MindGeek Defendants the images contained child pornography.
‘Pornhub would rather stop doing business than prevent kids from watching porn’
Pornhub has now ceased operations in 12 states that have begun to require age verification in order to enter the porn sites: Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Mississippi, Kentucky, Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, and Nebraska.
“The world’s biggest porn site would rather stop doing business than prevent kids from watching,” conservative commentator and author Michael Knowles noted earlier this year. “Quite telling!”
“Pornhub has decided that age verification laws damage their business model to such an extent that it is better for them to simply block entire states rather than comply with (age verification laws),” LifeSiteNews columnist Jonathon Van Maren wrote in January.
Despite the legal troubles, Pornhub racked up a total of 5.49 billion visits globally in May, and with over 1.1 billion visits in the U.S. was ranked 10th nationally for online traffic. It’s not unusual for the website to reach over 10 billion total global monthly visits.
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