A lawsuit filed by more victims of the sex trafficking operation claims that Pornhub’s moderation staff ignored reports of their abuse videos.


Sixty-one additional women are suing Pornhub’s parent company, claiming that the company failed to take down videos of their abuse as part of the sex trafficking operation Girls Do Porn. They’re suing the company and its sites for sex trafficking, racketeering, conspiracy to commit racketeering, and human trafficking.

The complaint, filed on Tuesday, includes what it claims are internal emails obtained by the plaintiffs, represented by Holm Law Group, between Pornhub moderation staff. The emails allegedly show that Pornhub had only one moderator to review 700,000 potentially abusive videos, and that the company intentionally ignored repeated reports from victims in those videos.

The damages and restitution they seek amounts to more than $311,100,000. They demand a jury trial, and seek damages of $5 million per plaintiff, as well as restitution for all the money Aylo, the new name for Pornhub’s parent company, earned “marketing, selling and exploiting Plaintiffs’ videos in an amount that exceeds one hundred thousand dollars for each plaintiff.”

The plaintiffs are 61 more unnamed “Jane Doe” victims of Girls Do Porn, adding to the 60 that sued Pornhub in 2020 for similar claims.
Girls Do Porn was a federally-convicted sex trafficking ring that coerced young women into filming pornographic videos under the pretense of “modeling” gigs. In some cases, the women were violently abused. The operators told them that the videos would never appear online, so that their home communities wouldn’t find out, but they uploaded the footage to sites like Pornhub, where the videos went viral—and in many instances, destroyed their lives. Girls Do Porn was an official Pornhub content partner, with its videos frequently appearing on the front page, where they gathered millions of views.

read more: https://www.404media.co/girls-do-porn-victims-sue-pornhub-for-300-million/

archive: https://archive.ph/zQWt3#selection-593.0-609.599

    • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Such a reductive take. Maybe they want porn that isn’t borderline, or questionable. Something where there’s zero potential for abuse. Unless you yourself are privy to the inner workings of each company and the story of each model individually, then you’re running into a risk of stuff not being kosher just by nature of the content.

      Plus, yeah, what about people who are into more extreme things? May as well let them have an outlet for their desires that doesn’t actually have anyone getting raped.

            • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Gotcha. I think it’s pretty fair to say rape fantasies are “more extreme” than vanilla porn, even if it’s pretty widely sought by both genders. Doesn’t really matter either way past semantics

      • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        May as well let them have an outlet yeah? Some of us dont want to live on that planet. I dont even want to live on the essential porn planet. As if men need more stimulation. Can the penis not be the center of the universe? Nope? Well fuck off then and take your porn requirement with you. I dont know know why your penis needs are foisted on people like me. Im just searching the internet but i have porn forced on me because of you. Rape porn, child porn, disgusting shit i never want to see but apparemtly its popular with dickbrains. Bugger the lott of you.

        • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          While I agree that some types of porn are pretty abhorrent, you also can’t just ignore that some people have a deviant nature inherently, and having safe outlets is better than having none.

          You’d do better taking a more moderate stance that might actually change monda than trying to bludgeon an entire population with your vitriol and frankly, sexism. Direct your anger at the people making, not the relatively innocent people just watching.

          • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The safe outlet thing is an asumption. Noone will agree with me but at least i can get it off my mind. The rage will never end because there will be no justice. Your relatively innocent people will ensure there is no justice.

            • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              You know, I’ll give you this much - there’s not much evidence on either side that it is a safe outlet. Until there is, the only metric we can really use is what level of harm is a thing existing , doing? And in the case of AI generated porn of ANY kind, it’s no one. I’ll accept that it may cause long-term societal harm, once I see proof.

              • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Ok, i beleive that the acceptance of rape porn is the same as the acceptance of rape. If you say its cool to get off on raping children in your head then making it real is no big difference. I genuinely dont see the difference, your intention to hurt and pleasure fron causing hurt is no different, your desire is no different .

                  • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    I never proposed policing dumbass i just have a sense of right and wrong. Very controversial i know

                • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
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                  1 year ago

                  So you must also think murder mystery books are horrid crimes? As are horror movies? Lot of murder depicted there. Accepting that is akin to accepting murder itself. Whats the difference? Youre getting off and entertained by murder? Clearly your desire is no different.

        • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Porn already is controleld much more than it ever has been in the history of the world.

          Yes “the Victorians” or “the Puritans” took a dim view of erotic material more than we do, but access to materials just needed you to walk to the bad part of town, where you’d engage a (likely trafficked, likely underaged) sex worker.

          I agree that porn can, in some circumstances, under some conditions, to certain demographics, be both a negative thing (and in other ways a positive).

          However, you’re never going to rid the world of horniness without chemically castrating the entire population of the world, and then there might be paraphilias that evolve even if you do.

          So it’s very much a case of what is freedom of speech, literature, art. Is The Birth of Venus porn? Could you make an argument for ancient portraits of babies with their weewee out being child porn? What about crudely drawn murals from antiquity? What about bathroom poetry? What about people having sex on a mountain (you know like we all used to do 100,000 years ago). Is Game of Thrones porn? Is 1984 by George Orwell porn? Is 120 Days of Sodom, which contains a LOT of disgusting sex and child rape, but was written to criticize/expose the aristocracy, not intended to arouse people, porn? What about Chuck Tingle, who writes to satirise porn not truly arouse?

          if all of this stuff is foisted on us by existing should anything be allowed to exist?

          I’m also not saying that porn is inherently good, nor am I saying nothing should be banned, but I am saying you haven’t adequately defined which porn should be banned, and without doing so you end up with a Diagenes’ plucked chicken: behold! a pornographic image!

          • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yeak, bottom line is humans are disgusting vicious and cruel. So porn is a given. Doesnt mean i have to take part. The fact that people like you try you try make humans look good is just embarrassaing.

            • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              I wouldn’t say my reply is attempting to make humans look wholly, completely good without exception.

              I wouldn’t even say it’s trying to argue pro-pornography. I’m saying that although I am probably more ban-happy than some on this site (I think there should be zero-tolerance for Nazis for instance), I think that rules about banning “material designed to arouse” becomes very quickly “ban anything I don’t like” especially as the Lemmy audience skews white-male, minority voices would effectively be silenced.

              Porn is the first and last bastion of speech, and no conversation about freedom is complete without countenancing it.