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/
It's quite simple honestly, if you profit off something, you have the responsibility to make sure it's legal. We all like platforms like YouTube where you can find anything you want, but the truth is that they're currently unsustainable when forced to comply with the law.
With the advent of AI there's hope for improved systems for detecting violations, but it doesn't seem to be there yet.
Morally, yes, in practice that's not how our economy generally works, this is a gigantic can of worms from cobalt mines to work safety in Asian textile factories and back and forth and into a gazillion places. Germany has recent legislation about this but AFAIK it's the only such legislation in the world.
Well, countries' laws, with some exceptions, only have authority within their own borders.
The German version is kinda only a proof of concept and saying to the rest of the EU "we're serious about this shit".
The actual goal is a EU-wide version which is in the pipeline, actually stricter (because Parliament wills it). It will apply to any company >250 employees with a net turnover of 40M in the EU (or world-wide for EU companies). And it's very hard to ignore the EU when you want to make money at scale, see the Brussels effect.