At the time of this piece, the petition to shut down Porn Hub for aiding in human sex trafficking has reached 168K.
A woman by the name of Laila Mickelwait started the petition. She’s the Director of Abolition at “Exodus Cry” an organization that helps those who have been trafficked for sex.
The change.org petition read in part:
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…”
The petition is seeking to shut down the mammoth porn site “Porn Hub” which has been involved in several sex trafficking cases over the past few months.
Laila goes on to share 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. 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.
She also points out that 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.
Laila discovered that all that’s needed to upload pornography onto Pornhub is an email address. She tried it herself. There is no government-issued ID is required, not even to become “verified” with its trusty blue checkmark that makes everything seem a-OK.
This is very concerning. Besides the fact that pornography addiction is literally ruining people’s lives, it’s also promoting and making sex trafficking even more lucrative – now at just the click of a link.
It took Laila just 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.”
The petition goes on to say that Pornhub admitted to verifying the trafficked 15-year-old girl who was sexually abused in 58 videos on its site. The official Twitter account for Pornhub wrote in response to the breaking story that the 15-year-old girl had been a verified member. After quickly realizing it had just admitted to assisting in her being trafficked, the account deleted the tweets, but the evidence of the admission was cached and still exists.
Please take a moment to read the entire petition here and sign the petition and pass this information on
The more we make people aware of this, the better chance we have of stopping it or at the very least getting some much-needed oversight.