Children Pornhub

The New York Times journalist tells how the most popular porn site earns on minors without their consent. And how they live later

On December 4, the New York Times Magazine article was an article by a journalist and laureate of two Pulitzer Prizes Nicholas Christophe about the popular PornHub porn test. In it, Christophe told the stories of teenagers whose videos came to the service without their consent - and how the site refuses to admit that he earns on violence.

Pornhub is the most popular porn site in the world: every month about three billion visitors come to it on average. This is more than Netflix, Yahoo or Amazon. In recent years, Pornhubtried to make pornography cease to seem like something shameful-for example, publishing the statistics of user preferences and was engaged in charity. And with the beginning of the pandemic of a new coronavirus infection, he discovered a free premium access for everyone.

However, the service, according to the American journalist Nicholas Christoph, has another, unsightly side - it is full of videos that capture real cases of violence. Pornhub, a journalist writes, earns on the rape of children, pornography posted on the Internet for revenge (Revenge Pornography); The shooting of a hidden camera, as well as the frames in which women are suffocated in plastic bags.

At the request of “Girls up to 18” (“Girls Under18”) or “14-year-old” (“14YO”) on the site you can find hundreds of thousands of videos. Not all of them depict victims of violence, but many, Christophe claims.

In confirmation of his words, the journalist gives a message about the woman who found 58 videos with her 15-year-old daughter after she disappeared without a trace. Also on the porn site published footage of sexual violence against a 14-year-old resident of California. This was not the authoritieswas informed by the service, but by the classmate of the girl who recognized her in the video. The perpetrators were punished, while Pornhub was not held accountable for the distribution of such videos and earnings on them, writes Christoph.

"They earn on my pain and suffering"

The journalist managed to talk with several people who, in adolescence, were faced with problems because of the site policy. “I never run away from this. I can be 40-year-old, with eight children, but people will still masturbate in my photos, ”a 23-year-old student named Kali told Christophe. She said that foster parents made her act in pornographic videos since she turned nine. Some of these videos then appeared on Pornhub - and, according to her, they still regularly appear there.

Another girl, 19-year-old Serena K. Flats said that at the age of 14 she fell in love with a guy older and at his request sent him erotic videos with her participation. He sent them to his friends, one of them published a video on Pornhub. Classmates of Serena learned about this and began to mock her. “They wrote to me that if I do not send them [more] video, they will show everything to my mother,” said Flats. Her mother still found out about what had happened: she managed to convince Pornhub to delete the video, as well as transfer Seren to another school. But the rumors reached there, soon a video with flutes reappeared on the service and other sites.

The incident strongly influenced Serena: after several unsuccessful suicide attempts, she acquired drug addiction, threw school and became homeless. Now Serena lives in a car. She has not used drugs for a year, but still does not work. Serena did not try to get a job, for example, to a fast food restaurant to be recognized: according to her, one of the videos in which she was 14 years old collected 400 thousand views. “All life can change due to one small mistake,” she told the journalist.

About the desire to commit suicide and attempts to do this to Nicholas Christoph was told by several more girls, with whom they published a video with their consent on Pornhub. “They [pornhub] earn on my pain and suffering,” said 18-year-old Taylor. When she was 14, her boyfriend quietly took off how they have sex - later the video hit the porn site. Another girl, 19-year-old Nicole, agrees with Taylor. Video recordings on which she without clothes appeared on Pornhub four years ago; For two years, Nicole has been trying to achieve their removal, but so far to no avail. “It will never end,” said the journalist Nicole. “They earn so much money on my injury.”

"Work itself is heartbreaking"

The Pornhub leadership refused an interview with Nikolay Christoph, limited to comment that the service “unconditionally” fights the materials containing violence against children. And the allegations that the company allows you to post on its website such videos - "irresponsible and clearly not true."

Like YouTube, any person can publish a video on a porn site. On average, 6.8 million new videos per year appear on Pornhub. Most of them, Christophe writes, probably published with the consent of adults taken on records. But many have children to whom violence are applied. Due to the fact that in the video it is often not clear how many years to a person-14 or 18-neither Pornhub, nor anyone can say how much the content of the site is illegal. At the same time, unlike YouTube, the service allows you to download the video from the site - and therefore even if the video is deleted by order of the authorities, it may be too late: it could have time to save and spread it further.

Pornhub did not answer Christoph about the question of the number of moderators working on the site. However, the former moderator of the private porno conhering Mindgeek (it includes more than 100 sites, companies and brands, including PornHub) told the journalist that there are only 80 of them in Mindgeek. Whereas Facebook has 15 thousand. According to Christophe’s estimates, to study 1.36 million hours loaded per year on PornHub, each moderator must view hundreds of hours of content weekly.

According to a former employee of a porn conflict, by video it is often difficult to determine not only the age of a person, but also how really the violence applied to him. At the same time, he claims, moderators, although they should filter content with children, the min model of the Mindgeek is based on a sex video with the participation of young people. “The task of the moderator is to miss as many [such] content as possible,” said Christophe’s interlocutor. “Work itself is heartbreaking.”

With the need to block content related to the operation of children, not only Pornhub is faced. For three months of 2020, Facebook removed 12.4 million similar images. Twitter for the same reason closed 260 thousand accounts in six months of last year. Pornhub, according to the non -profit organization of Internet Watch Foundation, in almost three years only 118 cases of sexual violence against children have been found. The organization could not explain to the journalist what such a low result is connected with. Christophe himself suggested that Porn Sit users are accustomed to such videos and rarely complain of them.

"These measures will not kill porn industry"

Pornhub, as Nicholas Christoph writes, makes attempts to rectify the situation, but "without much effort." The service has a list of prohibited content, including video on the topics “Rape”, “Teenage age”, “Pedophilia” and “Zoofilia”. However, already loaded videos with such descriptions were not removed. The search for similar words remained possible.

After the scandal with the Girls Do Porn studio, which forced women to star in porn films and then published them on the Internet (including PornHub), the service presented the software that supposedly prevents the re -loading of the video remote from the site. But this technology was easy to get around. Pornhub did not hold back and his promise to remove videos with the image of women deceived by Girls Do Porn. Some of them, Christophe claims, is still available on the site.

The authorities, the journalist believes, did almost nothing to combat the problem. Meanwhile, the fears around Pornhub are growing: a petition demanding to ban the service and bring it to justice collected more than two million signatures; Senator from Nebraski Ben Sasse called on the US Department of Justice to conduct an investigation against a porn site; PayPal has stopped cooperation with the service and called for this other payment systems. At the closure of Pornhub, 20 members of the Canadian parliament also insist, the company is based in this country. Nine women were also sued the service, who were taken to a hidden camera in the locker room of one of the colleges of South Carolina, after which they published a video on a porn site.

Nicholas Christoph himself believes that you can cope with the situation by changing Pornhub's policy. Namely, to allow the publication of the video only registered on the site users, to remove the possibility of downloading rollers and increase the number of moderators. “These measures will not kill the porn industry and will not much disturb its consumers,” Christophe is sure.

Christina Safonova retold