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/
Was this after PH removed all content from non-verified accounts? If so, one might wonder how much it actually helped.
It doesn’t help that much. When there’s a will, there’s a way.
Agreed, though I wondered if bad actors actually bothered, given the less restrictive competition. Probably because PH is so large?
I’m not gonna google the whole ‘GDP’ franchise/entity for hopefully obvious reasons but the ‘GDP’ franchise very well could be a verified account that creates content through exploitation and that being a very real possibility punches a hole in the effectiveness of attempting to moderate content by only allowing content derived from verified accounts. The article notes that the actual people reviewing flagged content can’t handle the sheer amount of flagged content so it’s likely they can’t handle verifying that content created by verified accounts isn’t content created through exploitation, so it’s probable once an account is verified it can just start sliding in all sorts of stuff that will go unchecked (as it apparently did in this case and others).