HOW SOCIAL MEDIA AND SITES LIKE PORNHUB SUPPORT INTERNATIONAL SEX TRAFFICKING

By: Alana Ballantyne

In today’s “sex positive” culture, it is easy to ignore the dark underbelly that walks hand-in-hand with the porn industry.

Pornhub, a Canada based company, attracts 3.5 billion visits a month, more than Netflix, Yahoo, or Amazon.[1] The site functions much like YouTube with users being allowed to upload self-made content and collect ad revenue from their uploads. While this model has been no doubt profitable for the company, it has also led to an exponential increase in non-consensual material linked to international sex trafficking being promoted to and used by a large audience around the world. 

The United States Department of State defines sex trafficking as “a person [being] required to engage in a commercial sex act as the result of force, threats of force, fraud, coercion or any combination of such means.”[2] The International Labor Office estimates that 3.8 million adults were victims of forced sexual exploitation.[3] An additional 1 million children were victims of commercial sexual exploitation in one year alone.[4] International sex trafficking predominantly affects Oceanic women of color, with seven in ten victims coming from the Asia or Pacific region. [5] The same data suggests that 99 percent of these victims are women and girls.[6]    

There are a myriad of ways that trafficker’s profit from the international sex trade, but many of them profit by creating amateur pornography with their victims and uploading the content. In one instance, a Chinese girl a was adopted to the United States and then trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in pornographic videos beginning when she was nine.[7] The videos were posted to Pornhub and her adoptive family was able to profit from her rape.[8] In the United Kingdom, it is estimated that nearly 13,000 people are living in sexual slavery, with most being economic migrants, refugees, vulnerable children, and teenagers.[9] Much of the pornographic content produced by such enterprises finds its way online to sites like Pornhub. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) found 118 instances of child sexual abuse material on Pornhub between 2017 and 2019.[10] As an example of the issue, some of the most popular searches on Pornhub include “young tiny teen,” “less than 18,” “extra small petite teen,” “under—age,” “tiny Asian teen,” or just “young girl” and “exploited teen Asia.”[11]

Assaults on unconscious women and girls can also be found on the site, with rapists opening the eyelids of the victims and touching their eyeballs to show that they were nonresponsive.[12] A video of a naked woman being tortured by a gang of men in China. [13]It is monetizing video compilations with titles like “Screaming Teen,” “Degraded Teen,” and “Extreme Choking.”[14] Look at a choking video and it may suggest also searching for “She Can’t Breathe.”[15] Users actively search for these videos and stream the abuse of women, while Pornhub and the traffickers profit from it all.

In response to a damning New York Times expose on this topic, written in December of 2020, Pornhub purged all videos uploaded to its site by so-called “unverified” users.[16] The purge of these amateur pornographers from the site deleted millions of videos.[17] The site hosted over 13.5 million before the purge; it had 2.9 million the morning after Pornhub removed all its hosted amateur pornography.[18]

Before congratulating Pornhub on prioritizing the welfare of women and children, it is important to note that (1) Pornhub only acted after two major payment processors, both Visa and Mastercard suspended service; and (2) the deletion of the videos was not met with a sigh of relief from the Pornhub community, but rather a sea of rage, with millions of regular users taking to various social media sites to voice their outrage that their favorite videos had been removed from the site.[19]   

The revelation that Pornhub is a hub for nonconsensual porn linked to international sex trafficking has shed light on the sex trafficking epidemic and its likes to popular social media sites. Facebook and Instagram have implemented strict enforcement policies that ban nudity.[20] Tumblr fully banned adult content in December 2018.[21] Twitter is now the hub for online pornographic content promotion but is currently being sued for allegedly failing to remove child pornography.[22] Twitter refused to take down widely shared pornographic images and videos of a teenage sex trafficking victim because an investigation “didn’t find a violation” of the company’s policies.[23]

 Oddly, after the New York Times scandal, Pornhub now leads the way in implementing safeguards against violent, illegal material. Now, every piece of Pornhub content now must be from verified uploaders, a requirement that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and Twitter have yet to institute.[24]

It is undisputed that sites like Pornhub attract and in some ways promote sex trafficking. The question now becomes what the law can do to address this issue. International laws regarding pornography vary wildly by region. In the United Kingdom, legislation proposed to make it more difficult for children to access pornography was shot down, though some content is moderated.[25] In Russia, the media overseer has the power to block and unblock porn sites, with the agency blocking Pornhub in 2014 and unblocking it in 2017.[26] In Malaysia, pornography is completely banned, with the country blocking Pornhub and similar sites. [27]

Currently, while the UN is certainly focused on combating sex trafficking generally,[28] there is no specific push to eliminate illegal content from social media and online hubs. With an ever more interconnected world, and with much of that connection occurring on social media, perhaps the international community could combat the illegal porn industry more effectively.

Despite its swift response to the current scandal, Pornhub itself may soon face the consequences of profiting from international and domestic sex trafficking. In December of 2020, forty women filed a lawsuit against Pornhub’s parent company, alleging that the site made millions off the women’s trafficking and abuse.[29] The lawsuit alleges that Pornhub knowingly posted and profited from the women’s abuse. Time will tell if Pornhub is held accountable, but lawsuits like this one illuminate the dangerous, pervasive role that social media sites play in the spread of illegal nonconsensual pornographic material, even if a way forward is not yet clear.

Picture Credit: Denitza Tchacarova is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

#Sex #Trafficking #Pornhub #Asia #International #Law #Ballantyne #Blog #Post #Women’sRights #WomenInLaw

[1] Nicolas Kristof, The Children of Pornhub, The New York Times (Dec. 4 2020) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html

[2] United States Department of State

[3] International Labor Office, Forced Labor and Forced Marriage, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, 1, 11 (2017) https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/documents/publication/wcms_575479.pdf

[4] Id.

[5] Id.

[6] Id.

[7] Kristof, supra note 1.

[8] Id.

[9] Editors, Taking a look inside Britain’s shocking sex-trafficking crisis, Marie Claire Magazine (Sep. 15, 2019) https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/reports/britains-sex-slavery-crisis-574513

[10] Megha Mohan, Calls for Credit Card Freeze On Porn Sites, BBC News (May 2020) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52543508

[11] Kristof, supra note 1.

[12] Id.

[13] Id.

[14] Id.

[15] Id.

[16] Noah Manskar, Pornhub removes most of its videos in effort to purge illegal content, The New York Post (Dec 14, 2020) https://nypost.com/2020/12/14/pornhub-removes-millions-of-videos-in-illegal-content-purge/

[17] Id.

[18] Id.

[19] Jazmin Goodwin, Mastercard, Visa and Discover cut ties with Pornhub following allegations of child abuse, CNN Business (Dec 14, 2020) https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/14/business/mastercard-visa-discover-pornhub/index.html

[20] Mark Hay, Twitter and the porn apocalypse that could reshape the industry as we know it, Mashable (Aug. 2020) https://mashable.com/article/twitter-porn-ban/

[21] Id.

[22] Gabrielle Fonrouge, Twitter refused to remove child porn because it didn’t ‘violate policies’: lawsuit, The New York Post (Jan 21, 2021). https://nypost.com/2021/01/21/twitter-sued-for-allegedly-refusing-to-remove-child-porn/

[23] Id.

[24] Jordan Valinsky, Pornhub Removes Majority of Its Videos After Investigation, CNN Business (Dec 2020) https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/15/business/pornhub-videos-removed/index.html

[25] UK seeks automatic blocks on online porn, The Boston Globe (July 23, 2013).

[26] Russia Blocks Access to Popular Porn Sites. Transitions Online (Sep 15 2016). https://tol.org/client/article/26316-russia-pornhub-roskomnadzor-blacklist-media.html

[27] Chief Charpee, PDRM Internet Monitoring Unit Now Has A Tool That Can Identify Porn Viewers, Lowyat, (July 2018) https://www.lowyat.net/2018/165735/pdrm-internet-monitoring-tool-catches-porn-viewers/

[28] United Nations, UNODC on trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants, Office of Drug and Crime https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/index.html

[29] Pricilla DeGregory, Pornhub owner sued by women claiming it made millions off sex-trafficking scheme, The New York Post (Dec 2020) https://nypost.com/2020/12/16/pornhub-owner-sued-for-profiting-off-sex-trafficking-court-papers/