The p0rnography website P0rnhub announced that it's enacting new standards after an exposé revealed the company has been profiting off videos of r ape and child sex trafficking victims.
In response to a New York Times report published last week exposing its child victims, P0rnhub announced the "huge changes," which include: Allowing only verified users to upload content, preventing users from downloading most content, and forming relationships with nonprofits to flag content.
"At P0rnhub, nothing is more important than the safety of our community. Our core values such as inclusivity, freedom of expression and privacy are only possible when our platform is trusted by our users. This is why we have always been committed to eliminating illegal content, including non-consensual material and child 5exual abuse material. Every online platform has the moral responsibility to join this fight, and it requires collective action and constant vigilance," the statement said in part.
Dawn Hawkins, senior vice president and executive director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, an anti-p0rnography group, took issue with P0rnhub's claims.
"P0rnhub cannot be trusted: it has profited for years from r ape, child 5exual abuse material, 5ex trafficking, and revenge p0rnography. The New York Times exposed P0rnhub for what it is: a profiteer of r ape. Any number of 'improvements' will not change that fact," said Hawkins in a statement on Tuesday.
"P0rnhub executives are liars when they claim they care about safety. Beyond their extensive history of facilitating and profiting from crimes of sexual abuse and exploitation, we know many survivors who have repeatedly reached out to P0rnhub to have nonconsensually-shared material — as well as videos of r ape — removed, but their requests were ignored."
P0rnhub is one of the most visited websites in the world, averaging approximately 3.5 billion visits a month, making it more popular than Amazon, Netflix or Yahoo.
On Dec. 4, Nicholas Kristof wrote a lengthy opinion column for The New York Times detailing how many minors have had videos of their r ape and abuse uploaded to P0rnhub.
According to Kristof, a search of the p0rnography site for "girls under18" or "14yo" produced over 100,000 videos with most of the results showing minors.
"After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on P0rnhub — in 58 sex videos. 5exual assaults on a 14-year-old California girl were posted on P0rnhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos," he wrote.
"In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but P0rnhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them."
Soon after the column was published, Republican members of Congress called upon the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate P0rnhub and its parent company, Mindgeek.
"5exual exploitation and human trafficking are abhorrent, period. A decent society should be working to end this," said Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska to The Daily Caller.
"It is completely unacceptable that P0rnhub and its parent company Mindgeek make money from r ape, 5exual abuse, and the exploitation of minors. They need to be investigated, and the DOJ needs more urgency about building cases against creeps."
Courtesy of The Christian Post
