OAN’s Brooke Mallory
12:03 PM – Thursday, January 25, 2024
Following years of litigation alleging that the pornographic website financially benefits from material depicting minors and portraying sexual abuse, Pornhub will soon start confirming the age and consent of all individuals involved in the sex videos posted to its site.
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The porn website and its parent business, Aylo, have been accused on many occasions of making money off of pornographic videos in which the subjects’ permission is unclear, and they have also been accused of neglecting to verify the ages of the people being filmed.
An email that 404 Media was able to obtain on Thursday states that Pornhub will now “require verification of the age and consent of every person” that appears in an uploaded video. The new regulation went into effect on Tuesday.
“On January 23, 2024, in addition to providing approved Co-Performer IDs, we will also require proof of consent, such as Signed Release Forms, when a new Co-Performer is added onto a Model account,” the email stated.
The purpose of this, according to Pornhub, is “foster a safer platform for all community members who upload content and engage with it.”
However, Laila Mickelwait, the founder of Traffickinghub, claimed in a video that was uploaded on X (Twitter) on Tuesday that Pornhub is not deserving of any praise for simply updating its rules. She also mentioned that the loss of significant business partners and hundreds of lawsuits are the real reason for the change.
“Even to this day, the site is still full of videos that are unverified,” Mickelwait said. “Because this change takes place from today, going forward. However, it isn’t being enacted retroactively, meaning all of the videos that have been uploaded to the site previously that were not verified for age or consent are remaining on the site.”
The founder of Traffickinghub demanded that all videos be taken down if the subjects’ ages or consented permission were not confirmed. She also stressed further that there is no way to know if Pornhub is storing illicit content on its platform along the way.
“But even if they do all of this, it’s too little, and it’s too late,” Mickelwait asserted. “Because they have spent 17 years globally distributing, profiting from, and shattering the lives of countless victims across the world.”
The anti-sexual exploitation activist stated that Pornhub has to be “held accountable to the full extent of the law” in spite of the latest modifications, and Mickelwait demanded that the pornographic website be taken down altogether.
Following a December 2020 New York Times report accusing the pornographic website of harboring content involving child sex abuse, Pornhub attracted a lot of media attention. Following the publication of the article, Pornhub removed millions of videos—118 of which were verified cases of child sex abuse—and the company later instituted new guidelines.
The parent company of Pornhub acknowledged in federal court in December that it made money from sex trafficking efforts, allegedly unbeknownst to them. Consequently, Aylo agreed to three years of surveillance, $1.8 million in payment to the U.S. government, and additional compensation to the victims.
Aylo was charged with knowingly hosting pornographic videos and “engaging in an unlawful monetary transaction with the websites GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys.” Following accusations of sex trafficking charges by the Department of Justice, the two websites were taken down.
After they launched a civil action in 2017, the prosecution said that Aylo “should have known” that the teenagers and minors in these videos had not given their consent. In 2016 and 2017, a number of women complained to the parent company of Pornhub about being misled and tricked into recording movies for GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys, which were then uploaded on Pornhub without their permission.
Prosecutors maintained that Aylo only terminated its partnership with GirlsDoPorn in 2019 and deleted all of the problematic content in December 2020.
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