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I've spent the last few months reporting this piece about Pornhub. What most people don't realize is that it's infested with rape videos. I talked to child trafficking survivors whose rape videos the company had distributed and monetized. Unconscionable: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html
I owe a special thanks to so many young women and men who shared humiliating stories and documentation to spare other kids what they went through. Brava to Serena Fleites, whose photo runs with the piece; at 14, her life was upended by naked videos on Pornhub.
Let's be clear: The issue is not porn, it's rape. Just as the problem with Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby wasn't the sex but the lack of consent, it's the same with Pornhub. Search "13yo" on Pornhub, and you get more than 100,000 videos. There are playlists called Under Age.
A special question for Canada, because Pornhub is based in Montreal. Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau, you are rightly proud of your reputation as a feminist. So why does Canada host a company that inflicts rape videos on the world?
It's not just Pornhub, of course. Companies have enjoyed impunity, so even as we prosecuted individuals like Jeffrey Epstein we allowed corporations like Mindgeek (which owns Pornhub) to monetize rape videos. Pornhub is Jeffrey Epstein times 1,000.
Pornhub has more visitors than Netflix, Yahoo or Amazon. It rakes in money from 3 billion ad impressions a day. Why let a major company like this profit from child sexual abuse materials? So many of the kids I talked to had attempted suicide after their rape videos were shown.
One of the most disgusting things I saw on Pornhub were videos of rapes of unconscious women. The rapists would touch the eyeballs of the women to show that they were completely unresponsive. Imagine the humiliation of those women when Pornhub shares the videos with the world.
Solutions are difficult and complicated. I don't have perfect ways to solve the problem of online child sexual abuse. But I do outline steps that would help. These survivors risked so much to tell their stories; I hope you'll read and share and speak up: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html
