What Companies Profit From Sexual Exploitation? The 2022 “Dirty Dozen” List

Disclaimer: Fight the New Drug is a non-religious and non-legislative awareness and education organization. Some of the issues discussed in the following article are legislatively-affiliated. Including links and discussions about these legislative matters does not constitute an endorsement by Fight the New Drug. Though our organization is non-legislative, we fully support the regulation of already illegal forms of pornography and sexual exploitation, including the fight against sex trafficking.

At the beginning of each year, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) releases the annual “Dirty Dozen List,” a compilation of reported leading contributors to sexual exploitation in America.

The list highlights major companies and other organizations that reportedly directly choose to profit off of pornography and/or contribute to sexual exploitation in society.

The Washington D.C.-based nonprofit gives the public an explanation of how these major companies fuel sexual exploitation and then lists actions that the public can take in order to persuade the “Dirty Dozen” to change their policies and practices.

Each year, the “Dirty Dozen” list aims to encourage businesses to remove sexual exploitation from their bottom line, or remove it from their company culture overall. This year, NCOSE says that the 2022 list “features several entities that have profited from the COVID-19 crisis by taking advantage of worsening social and economic vulnerabilities and harnessing the dramatic increase in online activity.”

Recent success of the Dirty Dozen includes popular video-sharing platform TikTok updating its safety features mere weeks after 2020’s list announcement included them due to lack of control parents could have over their child’s TikTok account. Past successes from this list include United Airlines training personnel on how to handle in-flight porn consumption from passengers, Hilton Hotels removing porn from their hotel rooms, getting blinders put on Cosmopolitan magazines in grocery stores, and Overstock.com removing pornography from their website.

One of the biggest successes in the history of the “Dirty Dozen” was in the summer of 2014 when Google met with the NCOSE and responded to being on the list by making the huge decision of no longer allowing porn sites to advertise using Google AdWords.

Curious to see who is on the 2022 Dirty Dozen List?

Here are a few heavy hitters that we’ve taken directly from NCOSE’s list who are reportedly contributing to sexual exploitation in the US right now. Click on the name of each company to learn more about what NCOSE says about how each contributes to sexual exploitation.

OnlyFans

OnlyFans significantly increased in notoriety and profit during the COVID-19 pandemic as the subscription-based platform known for pornography. This site has preyed on young adults’ financial insecurities and capitalized on youth spending more time online.

Sex buyers and traffickers maximize buying and selling people behind the security of a paywall. Yet survivors, whistleblowers, police, and investigative journalists have uncovered child sexual abuse material, sex trafficking, rape videos, and a host of other crimes, essentially making OnlyFans a safe haven for exploitation.

Reddit, referred to as the “front page of the Internet,” hosts more than two million user-created “communities” covering nearly as many topics.

Unfortunately, among these “subreddits” are countless sexually explicit images and videos posted without consent (image-based sexual abuse), child sexual abuse material (child pornography), hardcore pornography, commercial sex, and the likely facilitation of sex trafficking.

Not only does Reddit reportedly turn a blind eye to illegal and harmful content on its site, survivor requests to remove images of their abuse go unanswered.

Instead of prioritizing people’s safety and well-being, Reddit is focused more on profits by going public, aiming for valuation of over $15 billion while continuing to ignore the myriad forms of exploitation that prop up its value.

Meta (Facebook)

Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp: all of which are consistently under fire as primary places for grooming, sextortion, child sexual abuse materials, sex trafficking, and a host of other crimes and ills.

Given its prominence and resources, Meta has the potential to lead the tech industry in creating and implementing online safety standards. Instead, Meta is prioritizing new projects and products, all while pursuing increased, sweeping encryption without sufficient provisions for child online safety which will aid predators in escaping detection and accountability.

Twitter

Child abusers and other predators reportedly go to Twitter to trade in criminal content such as child sexual abuse and nonconsensual pornography.

The platform is rampant with accounts and posts functioning as advertisements for commercial sex.

Twitter fails to adequately respond to its victims, claiming it cannot be held accountable for disseminating illegal material. Twitter has even flatly refused to remove verified child sex abuse material from its site when asked by victims. Twitter must prioritize implementing robust and proactive efforts to remove sexual exploitation and abuse from its platform.

Visa

Visa rightly cut ties with Pornhub in 2020 after public outcry regarding the rampant sex trafficking and child sexual abuse material hosted on the pornography site.

However, Visa has since re-initiated a relationship with MindGeek (Pornhub’s parent company) and other pornography websites and failed to follow the example of Mastercard in requiring that sites hosting sexually explicit material implement common sense measures to prevent and remove illegal content.

Visa claims it helps power money movement globally, but that must not include powering the global economy of commercial sexual exploitation.