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/

archive: https://archive.ph/zQWt3#selection-593.0-609.599

  • Mandy@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    the fact the website had girls and porn in the same sentence alone is like, a big fucking red flag. Being called a girl as an adult, especially in porn feels demeaning at best or at worst, has some worrying implication (intended or not)

    • Stuka@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      What an incredibly naive stance to take.

      Not only is it flat wrong, you just choose to ignore the significant usage of boys / girls to refer to adults in pop culture. ie: boys will be boys.

      The term girls does not necessarily refer to underage, or women who appear underage. Same with boys. And making an argument to the contrary really just makes you look silly and discredits any legitimate point you might have.

      • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        The term boy and girl are not used in even remotely similar ways. Girl as a term is used for grown adult women altogether too often, and a disgusting amount in sexual contexts. Its always a girl fucking a man, never a woman fucking a boy. Infantilizing women is a core feature of patriarchy, and reducing us to subservient and submissive of men in a childlike way. Porn is, obviously, extremely sexualized and plays into male power fantasies and the male perspective on women in their day to day lives. The fact that girl is so often used then, indicates that term represents in some capacity the underlying view men take to women they are sexually attracted to and the fantasy they have of those women.

        And that should absolutely horrify you. If it doesn’t then on some level you’re just telling on yourself. Its one thing if one woman in a relationship likes being called a girl by her partner, another thing altogether when its mass media consumed by millions of men and is therefore devoid of any real emotional attachment or investment in the real woman in the video. Add in that its commonly known that pornography as an industry is chock-full of coercion / blackmail / manipulation / sex trafficking / rape and sexual abuse and it paints a picture of one of the most horrifying things that is normalized to exist in our society.

            • Stuka@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Here’s but one example, the term “boy toy” invalidates your whole paragraph.

              • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                1 year ago

                How often does that term come up in an industry widely known for raping men and full of other references to children such as “barely legal” “just turned 18” “jailbait” and so on? Tell me, is there a pattern in society of men being equated with children by people who disproportionately control the government and all levels of corporate and private society, combined with a long history of matriarchal thought that disenfranchises men of their rights?

                Again, no. Not even close. You clearly didn’t even read what I wrote, you read the first sentence thought “ha theres one example of women using boy in a sexual context, so that totally invalidates whatever nonsense she said in the rest of her comment”. Lazy, tired, and the same dismissal of women’s voices that always happens whenever this subject comes up.

                • Stuka@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Then frame your arguments better.

                  This is all in reference to the terms girl and boy. You lost that bit so now you’re pivoting to counter arguments nobody has made. Have fun with that.

        • db2@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          If you don’t have a therapist you might want to go ahead and get one. You’ve got issues.

          • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 year ago

            Emotion? What, sympathy and empathy for women? Are those supposed to be things we intentionally avoid in a conversation about the usage of terminology in pornography? Again, you’re just telling on yourself here.

    • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Yes yes and I don’t want to hear about me hanging out with “the boys” either when I’m with my male friends, we’re “the men” I suppose, to keep it consistant. I mean, I know nobody means it in a derogatory manner, at least mostly, but if “girls” is derogatory than so too must “boys” be, especially when used by those who claim “girls” is derogatory.

      I now expect the terms “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” become stricken from the lexicon since they are derogatory terms, instead “manfriend” or “womanfriend” must be used going forward from 00:00:00 on the individual in question’s 18th birthday.

    • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I hate to break it to you, but “girls” is just the term the porn industry uses. I get what you’re saying about it being problematic, and I don’t disagree, but suggesting that this is a red flag for sex trafficking is really close to just saying that all porn is sex trafficking, and that is SWERF nonsense.

      • Mandy@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        i never said its a red flag for sex trafficking? its just a red flag in general

        • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          its just a red flag in general

          That’s not how red flags work. A red flag is any indicator of danger. You have to define what that danger is.

          Since you were responding to an article about sex trafficking, and never bothered to define what kind of “red flag” you were referring to, it’s natural to assume that you were talking about a red flag for sex trafficking.

          Now I can see that you were just running your mouth about semantics without actually responding to the topic of this thread.