Petition to “shut down Pornhub” gets over 370,000 signatures in less than a month

A petition hosted on change.org is asking for government officials to take action against Pornhub and to “hold its executives accountable” for allegedly not taking enough preventative measures to hamper footage of minors and human trafficking from being uploaded onto their porn video sharing website. The petition is currently addressed to 15 governmental entities, including the Department of Justice, FBI, US President Donald Trump, and CA Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Launched on February 10th, 2020 – the petition is almost to 370,000 electronic signatures as of March 5th.

The petition’s organizer, Laila Mickelwait, points to an incident of Pornhub allegedly “verifying” the Pornhub community profile of an underage 15-year-old girl, whose abuser was arrested under suspicion of human sex trafficking. Laila Mickelwait claims that a now-deleted tweet by Pornhub described the 15-year-old as “a verified model with a valid ID.”

This incident calls into question Pornhub’s entire performer verification program, which Laila Mickelwait says does not require a photo ID, but just a photograph while holding a paper with your Pornhub username on it. The petition alleges that “Pornhub has no reliable system in place to verify that those in the videos it hosts are not trafficked children being raped on film in order to line the pockets of its executives.” Indeed, Pornhub was also in hot water recently for hosting GirlsDoPorn videos. GirlsDoPorn is a now-defunct website that was recently successfully sued by 22 women for sexually exploitative practices. Furthermore, Laila Mickelwait pointed out that anyone can register for an account on Pornhub anonymously (without photo identification) and upload content for worldwide consumption within minutes, heralding lax policies that could contribute to the spread of non-consensual, underage, and revenge pornography.

Pornhub recently provided a statement to The Daily Dot, minimizing the accusations and making unrelated claims against the organizers, reproduced in its entirety below:

“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. We use automated detection technologies such as YouTube’s CSAI Match and Microsoft’s PhotoDNA as added layers of protection to keep unauthorized content off the site. We also use 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. The petition is not only factually wrong and intentionally misleading, it was created and is promoted by a radical rightwing fundamentalist group in the United States—a group who’s founders have long vilified and attacked LGBTQ communities and women’s rights groups, aligned themselves with hate groups, and espoused extremist and despicable language.”

-Blake White, Pornhub VP (originally published on The Daily Dot)

In response to Pornhub’s claims about the organizing group, Laila Mickelwait tweeted “Pornhub resorting to completely false ad hominem attacks on me to deflect from their complicity in horrific crimes of sex trafficking and rape simply demonstrates the fact that Pornhub has no excuse. People resort to that kind of childish behavior when they have no real defense.” Later the same day, the organization backing the petition (where Laila Mickelwait works as the “director of abolition”) put out a “statement of inclusion” in response to Pornhub.

Laila Mickelwait was careful to specify that she does not support banning porn in an interview with MEA WorldWide, but rather “shutting a multi-million dollar company down who is profiting off of the rape, sex trafficking and assault of women and children.” While the petition is affiliated with a Christian anti-trafficking organization, Exodus Cry, the organizers describe it as non-religious and non-partisan and it appears to have a broad base of support, including numerous secular organizations and individuals. The organizers recently set up a standalone website for the campaign at TraffickingHub.com.

While we are not endorsing the shut down of any porn website and just reporting the news, Pornhub should probably start thinking about integrating a more robust system to properly verify the ages and consent of performers who appear in uploaded content. While they’re at it, maybe they can incorporate some age verification to ensure that kids and underage teens aren’t using their website and getting inadvertently addicted to porn.

Update: Both Laila Mickelwait and Exodus Cry responded to Pornhub’s claims against their organization, which we updated the article on March 6th, 2020 to include.