In the wake of surfaced allegations concerning rife sex trafficking and rape of minors on massive porn site Pornhub, Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska penned a letter to Attorney General Barr calling for an investigation into the porn site and its parent company MindGeek.
“In several notable incidents over the past year, Pornhub made content available worldwide showing women and girls that were victims of trafficking being raped and exploited,” Sen. Sasse wrote in the letter, according to the Omaha World-Herald.
In a press release, the senator noted that the “problem of Pornhub streaming content featuring women and children victims of sex trafficking reached the point in November that Paypal cut off services for Pornhub” and argued that “refusing to facilitate this abuse any longer Pornhub must not escape scrutiny.”
“I therefore request that the Department open an investigation into Pornhub and its parent entity MindGeek Holding SARL for their involvement in this disturbing pipeline of exploiting children and other victims and survivors of sex trafficking,” Sasse said.
As noted by the Omaha World-Herald, Pornhub is one of the most visited sites in the nation (ranking at number 34), racking up 42 billion visits in 2019 and averaging about 115 million visits per day.
“Pornhub’s incredible reach has a much darker side than the image of harmless fun that it tries to project,” the Republican wrote in his letter to AG Barr.
In response to Sasse’s letter, Pornhub issued a statement denying the allegations and aligning the senator’s efforts to shut it down with a campaign against the site by “a radical right wing fundamentalist group” whose founders “have long vilified and attacked LGBTQ communities and women’s rights groups, aligned themselves with hate groups, and espoused extremist and despicable language.”
“Pornhub has a steadfast commitment to eradicating and fighting any and all illegal content on the internet, including non-consensual content and under-age material. Any suggestion otherwise is categorically and factually inaccurate,” Pornhub said, according to Nebraska TV. “Our content moderation goes above and beyond the DOJ’s recently announced Voluntary Principles to Counter Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.”
Pornhub, apparently referring a petition with nearly 440,000 signatures calling for the shuttering of their site, added: “The petition is not only factually wrong and intentionally misleading, it was created and is promoted by a radical right wing fundamentalist group in the United States — a group whose founders have long vilified and attacked LGBTQ communities and women’s rights groups, aligned themselves with hate groups, and espoused extremist and despicable language.”
Vice Motherboard, a left-leaning site, notes, however, that some of Pornhub’s “high-tech” measures for fighting exploitation “can be easily and quickly circumvented.”
“Pornhub claims that victims of nonconsensual porn — as many of the Girls Do Porn videos are — can easily request to remove videos from the site, and that those videos can be ‘fingerprinted,'” Vice outlined. “Broadly speaking, video fingerprinting is a method for software to identify, extract, and then summarize characteristic components or metadata of a video, allowing that video to be uniquely identified by its fingerprint.'”
“But a Motherboard investigation found that this system can be easily and quickly circumvented with minor editing,” the site explained. “Pornhub’s current method for removing Girls Do Porn videos and other forms of non-consensual porn not only puts the onus of finding and flagging videos almost entirely on potentially-traumatized victims — those victims can’t even rely on the system to work.”
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