Women sue Pornhub’s parent company for hosting GirlsDoPorn com videos

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The lawsuit alleges that «as early as 2009, and definitely by fall 2016, MindGeek knew GirlsDoPorn was trafficking its victims by using fraud, coercion, and intimidation as part of its customary business practices to get the women to film the videos.» But not the videos strewn across its site, unless they were directly uploaded to that Girls Do Porn page. The women allege that the producers coerced them into shooting porn by telling them that the videos would only be distributed privately to individual buyers overseas, and that the content would not appear online. The women claim that the footage was then uploaded to the tube site Pornhub, and that they were subject to doxxing and harassment as a result. The suit alleges that Girls Do Porn benefited tremendously off exploiting the women, with its websites generating about $17 million. Pratt victimized hundreds of young women, federal prosecutors said, including at least one girl under the age of 18.

Lawsuit outcomes

The “force, fraud, and coercion” that is at the center of both the federal and UN definition of sex trafficking3 exists throughout the porn industry. And websites like Pornhub can no longer hide behind “we didn’t know,” which is most likely a lie anyway. “We didn’t care to know because we were making money off them” would be closer to the truth. In March of 2021, 70 Members of Parliament, as well as Senators, signed a letter to RCMP calling for a full investigation into MindGeek/Pornhub and the online exploitation of women and children. «MindGeek knew it was partnering with and profiting from a sex trafficking venture for years,» the latest suit alleges.

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As these cases prove, human trafficking isn’t a small, isolated, fringe issue in the vast online porn industry, as some might think. But a mainstream, rampant industry problem that often finds a home on Pornhub. But Pornhub also allows users to share in the ad revenue generated by the videos they upload. As a tube site, users can upload their own content to get views and ratings. The higher the views and ratings of that video, the more advertising revenue that video will likely generate.

Victims were told that the contracts they were presented with simply said what the victims had already been told, including that the videos would not be posted online. Nowhere on the contract could the reader find a reference to “girlsdoporn,” “girlsdotoys” or pornography at all. The companies were instead identified with innocuous names, such as Bubblegum Casting. Pornhub listed the official Girls Do Porn channels as a «Content Partner», and only removed it as a partner after the owners and employees of the ring—by then already embroiled in the civil trial—were charged with federal sex trafficking counts. The plaintiffs claim that Pornhub had a policy to never take action against Content Partner videos, and that videos’ popularity rather than the evidence of the victim’s lack of consent.

• «Following the FBI’s takedown of the GirlsDoPorn operators and business and filing of criminal charges, Aylo finally removed GirlsDoPorn’s videos from its websites. But this was too little too late,» the complaint states.
• Payment providers Mastercard and Visa have cut ties with the site after a New York Times investigation accused it of hosting child abuse and rape-related content.
• Pratt and his co-defendants were charged criminally in 2019 while they were fighting a lawsuit filed in state court by 22 women.
• It feels like karmic payback for all the videos of underage, trafficked, and raped women and children that are still up on their website.
• Hell, this was the case like fifteen, twenty years ago when I had subscriptions for several of the larger porn sites.

«You can hear the woman yelling to stop because it hurts,» she said recently of the video, which includes a tag showing it’s been on the site five years. «She’s angrily telling the man to shut the camera off and stop filming.» In August 2023, as part of the Pornhub network, Aylo launched UViU, a platform for creators to sell content directly to fans.[91] Designed with creator input, UViU helps diversify income and increase earnings. It offers tools for video sales, paid subscriptions, tips, and direct messages. Fans can discover and browse creators’ content, while creators can manage their Pornhub and UViU accounts from one dashboard.

And if you consider the abuse that is rife within the pornography industry, then really it is better to not increase demand for this material by consuming it. A Canadian X account, @EyeDeco, targeted Serena, who, having discovered videos of herself being abused as an underage teenager on Pornhub, came forward to Mickelwait. This account posted old Instagram images of Serena in an attempt to shame her.

I’m guessing you’re some sort of pornography addict, if it means that much to you that you whip out this level of hyperbole. It’s really quite telling that Pornhub is removing itself from all markets where it’s mandated to do this. Like all dealers of addictive and abusive substances, they want to hook their users in while young and impressionable. But the truth is, this will never happen, because sites like PornHub are not interested in keeping minors off. They want to get young kids (boys mostly, although I hear girls are getting more amenable) addicted to their porn.

There have been complaints from adults who say that images of themselves being sexually abused as children have been uploaded, and there is irrefutable evidence that Pornhub has hosted rape, trafficking and child abuse content. It claims that there were no videos of extremely young children being raped — “Every video and photo is reviewed manually before upload by a large and extensive team of human moderators” — yet the site was heaving with illegal content. In addition to granting rights to the videos, a federal judge ruled that GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys must return them and that all of the fraudulent “model agreements” are void.

She sent a second request that month asking MindGeek to remove the video from Tube8.com, another MindGeek property, the lawsuit said. Her third takedown request came in May 2017 «after MindGeek continued to publish her video on PornHub.com,» the complaint said. Michael Pratt, who allegedly manipulated hundreds of young women into making sex tapes and then lied about not distributing them, was included on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list this year. Brendon struggled with an addiction to porn for 12 years of his life and experienced many of its damaging effects first-hand, especially in his marriage. This led him to make an unwavering decision to begin the journey of finally get free from pornography.

Aylo says it has since developed an improved internal program utilizing both human moderation and AI software to verify illegal content is not uploaded and/or disseminated. Prosecutors say the website’s operators led women to believe the videos they appeared in would be distributed only to private customers living outside of the country, rather than proliferated online, despite always intending to post the videos on the internet. Women cited in the lawsuit were referred to by the pseudonym Jane Doe and a number. They were each seeking more than $1m (£739,000) in damages and had demanded a jury trial. Girls Do Porn was a part of MindGeek’s partner programs until October 2019, when the US Department of Justice effectively shut the porn producer down by arresting and charging its senior staff with sex trafficking and other offenses.