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We offer below a summary of an article published by the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, in Zuerich, on 2.1.21. It is a good example of how a single woman has confronted a multinational pornographic company. This is because pornography produces a strong addiction, morally destroying people, family and society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spDD0BEYPC0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdZXsWQ6g5I
Overnight, the world’s largest pornographic site deleted millions of videos. Behind it is a month-long campaign by American Laila Mickelwait. What drives her? She’s careful not to give away her whereabouts, but on the Internet she’s most present: American Laila Mickelwait is the head of a campaign that has unleashed a global drive in recent months, forcing the world leader in Internet pornography to delete most of her videos. The target is one of the most visited websites in the world: the video platform Pornhub. The removed videos not only display ordinary pornography, but also allegedly show sexual acts with minors and forced sex.
Mickelwait sits in front of her laptop somewhere in California and speaks out: “We want justice for the victims and the perpetrators in the dock,” says the 38-year-old. She is a member of the Christian non-profit organization Exodus Cry, which has been fighting human trafficking for eight years.
The activist believes that she is facing very powerful enemies – hence the discretion about where she lives, and she also does not want to talk about her family. The woman has set out to tackle the “big global porn business,” as she calls it. Firstly, with the Mindgeek Group, a “mega-predator” in the sector, with its tax headquarters in Luxembourg and offices in Canada and some 35 subsidiaries worldwide.
Categories such as “teenagers” are popular on the platform. The site operates in a legal gray area. Its turnover is said to be about 500 million Swiss francs a year. The company owns practically all the known free porn galleries on the Internet, from Pornhub to Youporn and Redtube. Recently, Mickelwait scored a victory: According to media reports, the porn-platform deleted 8.8 million of its 13.5 million Pornhub videos. What had happened?
He looked away for too long
Pornhub is the largest pornographic site on the Internet, with 115 million visits every day, almost as many as all the inhabitants of Australia, Spain and Argentina combined. In Switzerland, too, the site is among the 50 most popular in the country. It features a mix of pornographic videos from professional production companies and amateur films uploaded to the site by the users themselves.
Here’s the problem: all you need to become a pornographic producer is an email address and a username. Pornhub never controlled who uploaded the videos, nor how old the protagonists of the videos are. Categories like “Teenagers” are popular on the platform. The website operates in a gray area in this respect, taking advantage of gaps and inaccuracies in the laws on this subject.
So it happens again and again that the protagonists have not even consented at all to the publication of their videos. Thus, “Revenge Porn” is the name of a phenomenon that has arisen when ex-boyfriends who are fighting publish private videos of their former partner in order to make him denigrate him. In the galleries, however, even child pornography and videos of actual rape and violence can appear.
The pressure on Pornhub began to mount in February 2020, with the British station BBC picking up the story of Rose Kalemba of Ohio. The then 25-year-old was abducted at age 14, raped by two men for more than twelve hours and filmed in the process. Videos of this were found on the website under search words such as “unconscious teenager”.
One of them was viewed by over 400,000 people. The website allows messages to be downloaded and republished anywhere on the Internet. Pornhub did not respond to the girl’s repeated requests to delete the videos for months. It wasn’t until Kalemba came up with the idea of creating a fake email address and posing as a lawyer a year later that the pressure worked.
“Pornhub has been ignoring requests to delete the victims’ videos for years,” says Laila Mickelwait. “Instead of the corporation apologizing and making amends, the victims are vilified and silenced. Challenged by Kalemba’s case, the platform’s administrator alleged in an internet forum that the girl is an anti-pornography activist whose videos would not exist.
The campaign goes viral
Even shortly before the BBC initiative, Mickelwait went on the offensive. “It’s time to take down Pornhub,” he demands in a commentary in the “Washington Examiner. Pornhub, he says, profits from the illegal distribution and marketing of child pornography. She launched an Internet petition with a similar complaint. This spreads as if by itself, gathering 500,000 signatures in one month, which today is more than two million. More and more people are using Mickelwait’s #Traffickinghub hashtag, or “human trafficking center. People are starting to demonstrate in front of Mindgeek’s offices in Canada, on a weekly basis, and there are also protests in the UK and Los Angeles.
Laila Mickelwait collects more stories of abused children, clicking through hours of material, addressing what she otherwise prefers to keep shamefully quiet. Thousands of people now follow her on her Twitter account. Pornhub denies the accusations, and is improving its system for reporting abusive videos, starting to report child pornography to the authorities on its own, just to be on the safe side. While some of the perpetrators are convicted, Pornhub always gets away with it, until now.
When the “New York Times” made more cases public, in a major review about two weeks ago, Visa and Mastercard suspended their cooperation with the website, forcing the porn organization to react more drastically. deleting nearly 9 million videos of unverified accounts from its database and hiring more inspectors. Downloading videos is no longer possible.
A difficult market to regulate
Laila Mickelwait is still not satisfied with this. “Operators must be held accountable,” she says. Mickelwait studied public diplomacy in Los Angeles, has lobbied the UN against human trafficking, and has been writing a book on the harmful influence of pornography on children for eight years. She and her NGO are becoming targets for criticism. The founder of Exodus Cry has attracted attention in the past for his homophobic comments and anti-abortion slogans. “Exodus Cry has never done anything but fight human trafficking,” he says.
More than anything, the case highlights the complexity of regulating global Internet companies like Mindgeek. Pornhub’s position, after the elimination of much of its videos, is that they offer adult pornography. The organizations, he said, are the same ones that have always fought to eliminate commercial pornography on moral grounds. “We have always been committed to eliminating illegal content and child sexual abuse content.
Professional porn producers and sex workers have also criticized the campaign. Pornhub’s repression also hinders her ability to make money from her own productions. A petition from this milieu calls on Pornhub to take action against abusive material, but more importantly, to take consistent action against video piracy. Because Mindgeek owns virtually all of the free sites, the corporation benefits in any way from redistribution. Anti-Internet censorship activists also see freedom of expression being jeopardized by the actions of credit card companies.
Pornhub has grown so large that the problems can no longer be ignored. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced that he will draft new regulations for the platforms. The company’s managers are Canadian, but it is not known who owns it. A new law will also be drafted in the United States that will make it easier for victims to sue pornography companies that make money from their videos.
Mickelwait continues. Because what is the most popular porn site in the world for some, is the largest public repository of Internet violence for them.
