A petition that has been in place to shut down the porn sharing site, Pornhub, has now reached over 1 million signatures.
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The petition claims that in the last few months, there have been several shocking cases of sex trafficking and child rape films that were hosted on Pornhub. A 15-year-old girl who had been missing for a year was finally found after her mother was tipped off that her daughter was being featured in videos on the site — 58 such videos of her rape and sexual abuse were discovered on Pornhub.
Her trafficker, who was seen in the videos raping the child, was identified using surveillance footage of him at a 7-Eleven where he was spotted with his victim. He is now facing a felony charge.
Porn is serious business, but Pornhub is different to most sites. It is like the Youtube of porn, in that anyone can create a user account and upload their videos. The owners of the site are not responsible for the upload; the public is.
In march, U.S. Senator Ben Sasse, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, has written to U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, calling for a federal investigation into Pornhub and its owner MindGeek for their involvement in streaming videos of raped and exploited women and children.
It is reported that the world’s largest free pornography website which draws more than 110 million visitors every single day. Yes, that is every day. If the site could be viewed by Americans only, that is a third of the nation watching porn – daily.
“In recent news was the case of 22 women who were deceived and coerced by Michael Pratt, owner of GirlsDoPorn, into performing sex acts on film that were subsequently uploaded to Pornhub,” the petition states. “These women sued GirlsDoPorn and won a $12.7 million lawsuit against the company. According to a federal indictment, Pratt and his co-conspirators produced filmed child rape and sexual abuse content and trafficked a minor. Pratt reportedly fled the United States for New Zealand and is currently wanted on a federal warrant.
“But there are other individuals who should also be wanted by law enforcement — CEO Feras Antoon and COO David Tassillo of Mindgeek, the company that owns Pornhub. You see, Pornhub is complicit in the trafficking of these women and minors and probably thousands more like them.
“Pornhub is generating millions in advertising and membership revenue with 42 billion visits and 6 million videos uploaded per year. Yet it has no system in place to verify reliably the age or consent of those featured in the pornographic content it hosts and profits from.
“In fact, all that is needed to upload pornography onto Pornhub is an email address. No government-issued ID is required, not even to become “verified” with its trusty blue checkmark that makes everything seem a-OK.
“I know this, because I tried it.
“It took me under 10 minutes to create a user account and upload blank test content to the site, which went live instantly. I could have then gone on to become Pornhub-verified, and all I would need to do is send a photo of myself holding a paper with my username. That’s it.”
Earlier this year, United Airlines announced it is changing its in-person flight attendant training to include the issue of passengers using pornography. Flight attendants reported to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation that this new topic of training began in January 2020, and a United Airlines spokesperson confirmed to NCOSE that the training is now taking place.
In February, a couple were caught filming a sex scene in a Santa Monica public library to be uploaded to Pornhub.
Matthias Browning
Matthias Browning | Reporter
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