Pornhub investigation rape child abuse Serena Fleites, mastercard changes rules
An update to Pornhub's Awful World
Young heroes challenge pornography firms that monetize rape and child abuse.
We all need to uplift this awful year, so here's inspiring news about some young heroes and the good they've done on a gripping subject.
Young men and women who had been abused by Pornhub as children shared their experiences, evidence, and mortification in hopes of preventing exploitation of other children. And now, cautiously, there's hope they've brought change.
Tuesday, Pornhub revealed major steps that could drastically curb potential abuse if completely enforced. I don't trust Pornhub a bit, so officials need to track this sector in a way they haven't.
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Nicholas Kristof addressed this column, taking questions from readers on Twitter.
And maybe that'll happen. On Wednesday, four senators, Josh Hawley, Maggie Hassan, Joni Ernst and Thom Tillis, introduced bipartisan legislation to make it easier for rape victims to sue porn companies benefiting from their attack recordings. Another senator, Jeff Merkley, is separately preparing bipartisan legislation to control such companies more rigorously, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (home to Pornhub) said Tuesday that his government was also creating new rules for these websites.
Visa and Mastercard review their links with Pornhub; there are demands for criminal prosecution; advocacy organizations such as Traffickinghub are seeking action; and attorneys are circumventing civil suits.
All this might explain why Pornhub announced three measures on Tuesday that mirrored suggestions I made over the weekend in a long investigative column that quoted young people who so bravely shared their stories. 1.) It allows only people who have confirmed their identity to upload videos. 2.) Moderation increases. 3.) Video downloads no longer allow illicit content to proliferate.
We should all be suspicious. In September, a Tuscaloosa man was charged with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl in videos he posted on his checked Pornhub site. And even if there is no download button, other methods also allow downloading.
That said this is a huge deal, and it only happened because of the youth who spoke up and forced hard conversations that the leaders of government had dodged.
One woman I wrote about, 19-year-old Serena K. Fleites, felt her life spiral out of control after her nude videos were posted on Pornhub when she was 14; after two suicide attempts, she was homeless and living in a car in Bakersfield, Calif., with three dogs, dreaming of being a vet tech but no idea how to get there.
I'm delighted to say that Fleites was deluged with housing offers, employment, schooling and therapy, and she and her dogs moved to a long-stay hotel with the help of a GoFundMe backed by readers. One benefactor volunteered to make her education a vet tech.
When I put it to her, she wrote back: "Omg, that's sooo cool! I can't wait back to school! I'm ecstatic to hear... I just want to go to school to become a vet. It's hard going to school when living in a 3-dog car."
While it's great to see readers react so warmly to an individual story, we also need systemic reforms to support others and avoid abuse first. That means looking beyond Pornhub at less scrutinized rivals, particularly XVideos and XNXX. Both three are on the world's 10 most visited websites, each drawing more users than Netflix.
A quest for less than 18" on XVideos, the most visited porn site in the world, returns thousands of videos plus suggestions for additional searches: "training bra," "really young," "she's not an adult," "pre teens" and "11yo." And a search for "middle school" leads to a suggestion that "elementary school" also be attempted.
Folks, it's gross.
Some of the findings do not include children, but too many do and the site lures pedophiles to upload their own images. This is industrial-scale Jeffrey Epstein.
It's not pornography, but rape. Feeling revulsion at multinational businesses that monetize sexual attacks on children isn't prudent; it's compassion.
We should also do much more to help children less vulnerable to exploitation. That means reforming America's broken foster care system, and tackling our unconscionable child poverty rate.
I don't pretend there's easy fixes. But any combination of civil liability, criminal prosecution, government regulation, fines for credit card firms and banks, and international cooperation to deter firms from moving to less regulated countries can contribute to better conduct. We can never remove online child sexual exploitation content, but we can reduce the number of girls and boys who at 14 have their lives destroyed by a rich company monetizing their most mortifying moment.