Have you seen the reports recently that give visibility to the numerous cases of nonconsensual porn that have ended up on mainstream free porn sites?
Get ready for another one.
This time, it happened on the USS Emory S. Land, a vessel that supplies submarines. According to this NBC report, a Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) agent found dozens of videos uploaded to Pornhub of service members and civilians undressing in the vessel’s bathrooms.
The footage seems to have been recorded through a peephole in the bathroom walls or doors, and a handful of the clips reveal the sailors’ and Marines’ name patches on their uniforms, though none of the videos seem to contain sexual acts.
Investigators are still looking into who filmed these unknowing individuals and intentionally uploaded the footage online, but in the meantime, several points can be made here about the destructive practices of the porn industry.
Pornhub’s double standard
When NCIS sent a request to Pornhub to take the videos down from the site, Pornhub cooperated and removed the footage. In fact, it seems they were extremely accommodating to the officials’ appeals.
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Blake White, Vice President of Pornhub, made the following statement:
“[We got the request from NCIS] to remove the material in question and we did. We are currently working alongside them to assist with their investigation. Here at Pornhub, we immediately remove any content that violates our terms of use as soon as we are made aware of it.”
As cooperative as Pornhub seems in this case, they do not seem to be as eager to help in every case of nonconsensual porn on their site. In fact, White’s statement could be seen as an outright falsehood, based on past cases.
Here’s some evidence, for your consideration.
Dozens of cases of nonconsensual porn on Pornhub
The truth is, Pornhub and other sites reportedly regularly profit from nonconsensual footage uploaded to their sites, and are not as responsive as they claim in removing it in every case.
We could tell you case after case after case where Pornhub refused to take down nonconsensual footage when reports were filed, even though such footage violates their “terms of use” (pictured below).
Pornhub’s terms of use
Or if they did take it down, it was a delayed response or only after multiple requests.
The bigger issue is, even if the victims didn’t request to take it down, Pornhub and other sites like it allow nonconsensual content to be posted and profits from views and clicks despite its obvious conflict with their terms of use.
There’s Rose Kalemba, who, at just 14 years old, was filmed as she was gang-raped, stabbed, and beaten for hours. When she discovered that the footage was pasted across Pornhub—through her schoolmates’ bullying, mockery, and disdain—she pleaded with Pornhub to take the videos down. They ignored her emails for six months, until she posed as her own lawyer and they immediately removed the footage.
There’s the 15-year-old girl from Florida who was sex-trafficked and remained missing for a year. She was found in the fall of 2019 when her mother reported to the police 58 videos on Pornhub of the girl being raped by her trafficker and other sex buyers. Reports suggest that she was “verified” on Pornhub through their official verification process, giving her videos a blue checkmark by her name, implying that she was an adult professional consenting to such footage. Pornhub does not require any personal identification to “verify” their account holders or their ages. In response to news coverage of this girl, tweets like this one came pouring in from victims (many of them minors) whose nonconsensual porn remains live and accessible online.
I was trafficked and used in child pornography, and my videos are still up on Pornhub and many other sites across the internet. This thread is so important, and it’s awful to know I’m not the only one going through this. https://t.co/KQixkFSvWV
— Avri Sapir (@AvriSapir) February 13, 2020
There was the highly covered Girls Do Porn case, where 22 of the hundreds of victims of the popular Pornhub channel “Girls Do Porn” sued the content’s producers for sex trafficking them on set. And despite multiple video removal requests in 2015 and 2016 from the multiple women who were trafficked, Pornhub only removed the original uploads from their site after the channel’s owners were arrested and federally charged with sex trafficking last October. Before that, many of the original videos were downloaded and re-uploaded to Pornhub by various users, and are still available to watch. They’re reuploaded regularly to various porn sites.
There’s the woman who found videos filmed by her ex-boyfriend uploaded to Pornhub and got the police involved. Her criminal case fell through because Pornhub ignored the police’s request for a statement regarding their uploading process. And the footage of the woman is still live on the site.
And here are more cases of nonconsensual content on the platform, some of which are still viewable on the site at the time of writing this article.
The problem is that Pornhub operates with a glaring double standard—ignoring victims themselves but only sometimes responding to authorities. Do their actions indicate that their ultimate motives truly are to actively protect victims from exploitation? We don’t think so.
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If this were the case, Rose Kalemba’s emails, for example, would have been more than sufficient for action on their part, and they would employ more proactive ways of monitoring content on their site and not leaving it to the victims to find, report, and fingerprint their own content.
Pornhub’s reactive system is not enough
And in their best moments, when they do respond as they did with the USS Emory reports—again, it was federal agents who reported this one—and remove footage immediately, even that isn’t enough.
Having a reactive system rather than a proactive one allows for victims’ footage to be broadcasted indefinitely before it is stopped, accumulating potentially millions of views and being downloaded on multiple devices in the process. Those views are contributing to what Women Against Revenge Porn founder Rebekah Wells calls “cyber rape,” sometimes causing life-altering emotional, psychological, and relational damage in the victims’ lives.
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Pornhub and sites like it could do more than remove nonconsensual footage, and we know that they know how, but the current system is set up in a way that is reactive and not proactive. Kate Isaacs, founder of the #NotYourPorn movement, discusses how, even when originals are removed, copies and ripped versions of the footage can be continuously uploaded and re-uploaded.
Pornhub might remove an original when pressured, but, “There are so many different algorithms and processes that [Pornhub] could borrow from similar models like YouTube [to combat the pirated upload cycle], but the fact that they are not invested in that is very telling,” Issacs says.
And what’s more—this reactive system puts the burden of discovery and remediation on the shoulders of the victims themselves or their loved ones, not the porn site. This system ultimately absolves the site of accountability and responsibility. And when these victims are traumatized and often underage, with little power to fight the global reach of the potentially $97 billion industry, how is this system acceptable?
If YouTube, for example, were to have the same system, isn’t it reasonable to say there would be collective public outcry and massive systemic changes on their part?
Related: Pornhub Refused To Remove Videos Of This Minor’s Sexual Assault—Until She Posed As Her Own Lawyer
As long as the porn industry reportedly profits from revenge porn, rape videos, and other nonconsensual porn, waiting until an authority with actual power to confront them, they are not protecting victims—they are actively aiding in their exploitation.
It is time for society to recognize the porn industry’s active role in fueling and profiting from sexual exploitation. Are you with us? Share this post and spread awareness on social and in your community.
