Pornhub Responds To Petition Threatening To Shut Down Site For Illegal Acts

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Pornhub.com is no stranger to legal controversies as they are constantly being sued for some outlandish reasons. Just recently, they were in a legal battle against a user who was upset over the lack of closed captioning for the hearing impaired. Most lawsuits involving porn can be pretty comedic but their latest legal issue is anything but funny.

Nonprofit organization Exodus Cry, who defines themselves on their website as “an organization that would combine prayer and practical ministry to see sex trafficking and slavery ended around the world,” is applying pressure to have the site shut down for good. Exodus Cry started a Change.org petition in an effort to hold PornHub and its executives accountable for their part in aiding sex trafficking.

The petition currently sits around 293,000 signatures, just shy of its 300K goal. The reason behind this movement is due to a recent increase in PornHub allegedly letting users upload sex trafficking and child rape films without consequence and allowing them to be hosted on their site.

In the petition, Exodus Cry also reveals that recently, a 15-year-old girl was found after being missing for an entire year when her mother received a tip that Pornhub had videos that featured her being sexually abused. The girl was found after her abuser was identified using surveillance footage of him at a 7-Eleven with the missing teen.

Research from the case in question revealed the abused teen was featured in 58 videos that were uploaded to the site. For context, Pornhub is one of the top 50 websites in the world, receives over 33 billion website visits a year (there are 7 billion people in the world), and generates almost half a billion dollars annually. With that being said, they are still having issues protecting themselves against human trafficking uploads and now, they are on the hook for it.

Pornhub realized that the movement to shut them down is quickly picking up steam and finally issued a response stating the following:

“Pornhub has a steadfast commitment to eradicating and fighting any and all illegal content on the internet, including non-consensual content and child sexual abuse material. Any suggestion otherwise is categorically and factually inaccurate. While the wider tech community must continue to develop new methods to rid the internet of this horrific content, Pornhub is actively working to put in place state-of-the-art, comprehensive safeguards on its platform to combat this material.

These actions include a robust system for flagging, reviewing and removing all illegal material, employing an extensive team of human moderators dedicated to manually reviewing all uploads to the site, and using a variety of digital fingerprinting solutions. These include but are not limited to Microsoft’s PhotoDNA, a technology that aids in finding and removing known images of child exploitation, as well as Vobile, a state-of-the-art fingerprinting software that scans any new uploads for potential matches to unauthorized materials to protect against any banned video being re-uploaded to the platform. We are actively working on expanding our safety measures and adding new features and products to our platform to this end, as they become available. Furthermore, Pornhub will continue to work with law enforcement efforts and child protection non-profits in the goal of eliminating any and all illegal content across the internet.”

Pornhub definitely shouldn’t expect this to go away anytime soon, so they need to implement more ways to protect unwanted and illegal videos being uploaded to their site while building a better relationship with authorities to hold the criminals doing such accountable.