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7 scandals PornHub doesn’t want you to know about PornHub believes itself above all laws—including those against child pornography. No wonder 946k people have signed to shut it down.

With approximately 120 million daily visitors, Pornhub has enjoyed its status as the world’s most popular online destination for pornbrains, but a barrage of recent scandals threatens to draw the eyes of lawmakers to clamp down on the site’s ability (or rather, inability) to moderate its content for illegality.

The latest scandal stems from reports that one of the site’s top “performers,” Ellesclub, was underage. Her content was fully monetized by Pornhub.

In the last few months, Pornhub has been hit by several shocking cases of sex trafficking and underage content, prompting activists like Laila Mickelwait to establish the Traffickinghub campaign to hold the site and its executives accountable for the content hosted by their platform.

Kidnapped girl forced to perform in “verified” PornHub videos

As Mickelwait describes in her Change.org petition, a 15-year-old who was missing for over a year was featured in 58 videos of her rape and sexual abuse—all of which went

unmoderated for that same period of time. The petition now has close to a million signatures.

A South Florida teenager who was abducted in 2018 was forced to perform in dozens of pornographic videos with her kidnapper. In the year she was missing, the teenager was listed as a “verified” model on Pornhub and Modelhub, and her videos which were initially uploaded to Pornhub, made the rounds on Periscope and Snapchat, according to Newsweek. The victim says that she was forced to have an abortion after being impregnated by her abductor, 30-year-old Christopher Johnson.

PornHub has yet to remove illegal Girls Do Porn sex trafficking content

The case of Girls Do Porn involves a semi-professional pornographic company that coerced girls into having sex on camera under false pretenses. Long story short, the performers were told that their sex acts were being filmed for a private buyer in Australia and that no one else would ever see them perform. Many of them were broke college students who debased themselves to make ends meet.

Instead, all their videos were then marketed and sold online. Pornhub served as the launchpad for their widespread dissemination. They were defrauded by its creator, Michael Pratt, and many were coerced into performing sex acts they didn’t initially agree to. The victims sued Girls Do Porn and are now owed $12.7 million in damages. Pratt fled to New Zealand and is now a wanted by the FBI for his role in the case. He has been charged with sex trafficking.

Despite the criminality of the content, Pornhub has yet to remove the videos that remain on its website from the illegal enterprise.

PornHub refuses to remove child pornography unless you have a lawyer

Via Laila Mickelwait — In February 2020, the BBC reported the harrowing story of 14-year-old Rose Kalemba from Ohio who was taken at knifepoint, raped for 12 hours, and the crime scene videos of her abuse were uploaded to Pornhub.

Rose said that she pleaded with Pornhub to remove the videos of her rape and torture for months, and it wasn’t until she posed as a lawyer and threatened legal action that Pornhub finally took them down.

– BBC

A few months later, Rose was browsing MySpace when she found several people from her school sharing a link. She was tagged. Clicking on it, Rose was directed to the pornography-sharing site, Pornhub. She felt a wave of nausea as she saw several videos of the attack on her.

“The titles of the videos were ‘teen crying and getting slapped around’, ‘teen getting destroyed’, ‘passed out teen’. One had over 400,000 views,” Rose recounts.

“The worst videos were the ones where I was passed out. Seeing myself being attacked where I wasn’t even conscious was the worst.”

Rose says she emailed Pornhub several times over a period of six months in 2009 to ask for the videos to be taken down.

“I sent Pornhub begging emails. I pleaded with them. I wrote, ‘Please, I’m a minor, this was assault, please take it down.’”

She received no reply and the videos remained live.

PornHub is the world’s host for revenge porn and doesn’t care

Pornhub has become the de facto platform for scumbags to upload revenge porn of their ex-lovers and continues to host intimate images without the consent of the victims. In 2019, a Canadian woman sued her ex for uploading images of her most intimate moments onto the platform.

Per the claim, the scumbag in question — Daylan Heidel — used a series of pseudonyms to upload images and videos to Pornhub (among other websites) between January 2015 and July 2019. The ease of the site’s use enabled him to do that, and the lack of moderation and required verification made it easy for him to do without getting caught. One of the videos, the victim says, was viewed more than 1.5 million times.

Also celebrity deepfakes

In addition to cases of kidnapping, Pornhub also hosts a plethora of “deepfakes” of celebrities. The content, which first made the rounds a couple years ago with the emergence of the video manipulation technology, were initially prohibited by the platform. They were quickly removed, until Pornhub — for whatever reason (read: monetary reasons) — ceased to give a shit and allowed their widespread proliferation.

This year, Pornhub put out a press release to brag about which celebrities were searched for on its website. While actresses are not strangers to being looked up online for the purposes of self-gratification, the content in which they appear nude or otherwise performing sexual acts tend to be from copyrighted movies and Netflix or HBO shows. It’s stolen content that doesn’t belong to Pornhub, that the platform is more than eager to monetize while it simultaneously puts the thumbscrews on porn industry professionals to coerce them to upload their content onto the platform.

Copyright issues aside, Pornhub is either “unable or unwilling to control non-consensual pornography on its platform, searching for these names will immediately lead users to deepfake porn of these women,” per VICE.

PornHub ‘verifies’ underage pornstars — Ellesclub

The latest scandal to rock Pornhub revolves around a girl named Elle, who went by “Ellesclub” on the platform. Elle, whether through her own doing or through the coercion of someone else, was underage when she uploaded pornographic videos of herself onto the site.

Despite the lack of proper age verification, Pornhub and Modelhub were more than happy to grant her a “verified” tag and even awarded her for being a top “performer” on the site.

As Laila Mickelwait states on Twitter, her account photos taken of her as an underage child were fully monetized by Pornhub.

Do your part

Over 946,000 have signed. Will you do your part?

DECEMBER UPDATE: Most credit card companies have now blocked PornHub from their services. Thank you Laila Mickelwait and everyone who helped out in big ways or small.

Sorry, Afrunauts! While 85% of you are wonderful people, the other 25% were far too frequently brigades and troll farms. Their abusive comments have traumatized our moderators, and so we can't allow comments until we have built an ethical way to address the troll problem. If you feel the calling and you have familiarized yourself with what is and isn't free speech, you can still email us your scribbles. If your feedback is excellent, we may manually add it!
PS. The A Black Woman Is Speaking mug is a standing invitation to sit down, shut up, and engage in the wisdom shared by Black women. Lord knows the world needs it right now.

1 thought on “<span class="entry-title-primary">7 scandals PornHub doesn’t want you to know about</span> <span class="entry-subtitle">PornHub believes itself above all laws—including those against child pornography. No wonder 946k people have signed to shut it down.</span>”

  1. I remember a story from last year…there was this absolutely horrific gang grape in india that they filmed and put on pornhub. It remained up for several years and was one of their most trafficked videos. I don’t remember specifics or the link sorry, maybe another commenter can help

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