Black market elements of Pornhub: Why performers are speaking out

On June 30th, Laila Mickelwait posted a video on her Twitter page as part of the TraffickingHub campaign to shut down the world’s largest porn site, Pornhub. The now viral video outlines Pornhub’s enabling & profiting of sexual crimes such as rape, abuse, and trafficking on its site. 

Laila Mickelwait has dedicated her life to fighting against sex trafficking and the expolitation of women. She intends to hold Pornhub accountable for the videos that have gone up on their site featuring horrific sex acts, yet it’s not an easy battle when the porn site giant has dodged accusations from victims for years. Now Mickelwait & Traffickinghub are not stopping until the blackest recesses of Pornhub are exposed.

Disturbing content 

There are a slew of complaints leveled at Pornhub for the site’s lack of policing on their porn site. Pornhub has no system in place that reliably verifies the age or the consent of anyone featured in a video and uploaded by a community user. The video on Mickelwait’s twitter outlines some disturbing cases. 

The first case in the video is the fifty-eight videos featuring the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl found on Pornhub. Then there is Rose Kalemba who was held at knifepoint and raped for twelve hours only to have the video of her abuse then posted to Pornhub. There have also been images of a toddler being sexually abused on the site as well as twenty-two women, coerced into doing porn by a channel featured on Pornhub.

Speaking out against the site

Victims whose abuse has been recorded and uploaded to the porn streaming site have to fight tooth & nail to remove it. In the case of Rose Kalemba, the fourteen-year-old girl had to beg Pornhub for months and threaten legal action to take down the video of her assault. 

The victims of porn exploitation are now speaking out and Laila Mickelwait’s foundation, Exodus Cry, receives messages from victims almost daily, coming forward to share their stories about Pornhub. Mickelwait is also certain that there are many male victims who have yet to come forward and has been recently been researching problematic videos found on the gay portion of the website.

Pornhub’s black market 

The abusive videos on Pornhub show that the site has a black market of taboo content. The fifty-eight videos of the raped fifteen-year-old were all monetized on the site, meaning that Pornhub directly profited off of the victim’s assault. Pornhub, at one time, posted an apology that accidentally admitted to complicity in the victim’s trafficking, but that post has since been deleted. 

Pornhub has over 600,000 million views & over 800,000 subscribers and they profit hundred of millions of dollars in ad revenue, subscriptions, and data collection. As Pornhub is the largest of the porn streaming sites, of which there are thousands on the internet, holding them accountable would be a step to enact blanket regulations to require age & consent verification for every video uploaded on any porn site. 

Overhauling the porn industry 

As of June 9, 2020 the petition created by Laila Mickelwait for the TraffickingHub campaign has reached over one million signatures with signers from 192 countries. Over three hundred anti-trafficking, child protection, and women’s rights organizations have endorsed the petition. 

Professionals in the adult film industry have also spoken out against Pornhub and other “tube” sites engaging in trafficking, and posted a manifesto which supports the TraffickingHub campaign. The campaign has drawn Canadian & US legislators to begin federal level investigations of Pornhub & its parent company MindGeek. 

Laila Mickelwait continues to expose the black underbelly of Pornhub and others like it on the internet. Mickelwait has stated about Ponhub, “The site is set up for exploitation and is infested with videos of the real rape, trafficking, abuse, and exploitation of women and children. We have significant evidence and it is just the tip of the iceberg. Shut it down.”