PornHub let child pornography sit untouched on its website for years, including content one employee admitted would put him behind bars “for a long time” if it was found on his computer, discovery documents released in error reveal.
Internal messages, emails and memos from around 2020 reveal the company struggling to clear child pornography from its website while executives debated measures to crack down and staff tasked with removing it made light of the situation.
The documents, first reported by the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, are part of discovery in an Alabama class action lawsuit brought by child sex trafficking victims who allege PornHub’s parent company MindGeek financially profited from distributing videos depicting their abuse.
“You guys want to laugh,” one staff member wrote in an April 7, 2020 message. “[I]t caught a cp [child pornography] video from 2009…a full on cp video on the site for 11 years.”
At one point, one staff member was told not to include a superior on child sexual abuse material (CSAM) report emails.
“He doenst wnat [sic] to know how much cp we have ignored for the past 5 years?” the employee responded.
Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, told the DCNF its policy is not to comment on ongoing litigation to respect the “integrity of court proceedings.”
“We look forward to the facts being fully and fairly aired in that forum,” the company told the DCNF.
However, the company did state it has “instituted some of the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history in order to mitigate the ability of bad actors to abuse our platform and post unwanted material.”
‘I Hope I Never Get In Trouble’
One discovery document tracking keywords shows the phrases “12yo” and “13yo” resulted in 155,447 videos each on the website, while the term “7yo” yielded 5,387 results. Other tracked terms include “girls under18” with 146,248 videos and “Degraded Teen” at 1,537.
One memo suggesting words that should be banned notes the term “infant” resulted in 764 videos. Yet terms like “childhood,” included 1,519 video descriptions, or “forced,” included in 548,697 descriptions, are not recommended to be banned.
“I hope I never get in trouble for having those vids on my computer LOOOOL,” one staff member wrote in a March 2020 message.
“I found one yesterday night…that i had forgotton to delete…and it was a really bad one…like i will go away for a long time,” another staff member replied.
The first employee suggested that MindGeek would “vouch for us if we every [sic] get arrested.”
The word “teen” has at times ranked among the website’s top search terms, according to company reports. Some email exchanges show executives unsure of what words to ban.
In June 2017, an executive suggested blocking the term “rapped” but allowing the term “young girl.”
Around May 2020, there were more than 706,000 videos flagged by users for underage content or other terms of service violations, according to internal emails. A video would only be prioritized for removal at the time if it had been flagged more than 15 times.
Similar figures were also included in emails released as part of discovery in a class action lawsuit filed against MindGeek in California, which Justice Defense Fund CEO Laila Mickelwait shared in 2023 on X.
In June 2020, a company leader acknowledged they had previously not been “enforcing strict rules” for staff who failed to block violations.
“Now older mistakes are found and many will continue to be found from the 700k backlog and if I go ahead and enforce the strict/rules guidelines we will lose a significant amount of our agents and cause chaos within the team,” a member of leadership wrote.
Pornhub removed more than 10 million videos from its website in December 2020 after the NYT reported instances of child sexual abuse material on the website.
The company also announced that it had “banned unverified uploaders from posting new content, eliminated downloads, and partnered with dozens of non-profit organizations” as part of its new safeguards.
Other safeguards Aylo told the DCNF it has implemented include “an uploader verification program that uses secure biometric facial recognition technology to ensure the identity of the uploader of all pieces of content,” “utilization of digital fingerprinting technology to prevent the re-upload of unauthorized material,” and “a constantly evolving banned keyword list that disallows searches for more than 60,000 words and phrases in multiple languages.”
Mickelwait said the documents reveal PornHub went “far beyond negligence.”
“It was systemic criminal conduct—monetized sexual abuse on an industrial scale, driven by willful corporate decisions,” Mickelwait said in a statement Saturday. “These newly released documents confirm what survivors have long known: Pornhub executives knew they were distributing child rape—and they chose profits over children’s lives.”
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/NBC Nightly News)
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