Adult entertainment insiders have long held a grudge against Pornhub for decimating their business. When Pornhub and other tube sites hit the scene in the late aughts, pirates were immediately attracted to the upload-anything free-for-all they offered—and that piracy drove the porn industry into a financial decline it’s not yet recovered from. But that same anything-goes uploading policy has hurt more than porn professionals. In 2020, some of the damage it’s caused is coming home to roost.

Victims of sex trafficking, underage sexual assault, and revenge porn are coming forward to allege that Pornhub is complicit in the crimes committed against them, and is in fact profiting on their pain. To date, nearly 450,000 people have so far signed a Change.org petition called “Shut Down Pornhub and Hold Its Executives Accountable for Aiding Trafficking.” 

“Pornhub is generating millions in advertising and membership revenue with 42 billion visits and 6 million videos uploaded per year,” reads the petition. “Yet it has no system in place to verify reliably the age or consent of those featured in the pornographic content it hosts and profits from.” 

The petition goes on to enumerate several cases in which videos depicting sex trafficking, child sexual abuse, and revenge porn were found on Pornhub. And that’s apparently just the tip of the iceberg. A number of women—some anonymous and some not—have come forward to speak publicly about their experiences with finding footage of their most painful moments on the streaming giant, waiting days or weeks for the videos to be removed, and to be devastated when the footage reappeared, often with personal identifying information.

“We have tried to have my friend’s videos taken down,” wrote Kate Isaacs, the founder of the #NotYourPorn movement, in The Guardian. “We told the company that she was underage, that she didn’t consent to being on their website and still it took several weeks to remove it. Unfortunately, by then the damage was already done. When one video had been removed, an identical video with her full name attached would pop back up again.”

Isaacs also told The Independent, “Women and children across the world are being exploited and packaged up as ‘pornstars’ for profit without their consent,” citing many other stories from other victims.

The petition, and the voices of those who support it speaking out about their experiences, have gained traction. As of Wednesday evening, 442,660 people had signed it. And it’s gotten the attention of lawmakers, who are taking up the cause.

On Tuesday, Fox News reported that at least three federal lawmakers—both Democrat and Republican—had come forward to denounce the company’s practices. Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb even) even went so far as to write to Attorney General William Barr, asking him to launch a DOJ investigation into Pornhub’s practices. In her letter, Sasse wrote, “Publicized cases clearly represent just the tip of the iceberg of women and children being exploited in videos on Pornhub.” She also wrote that Pornhub appeared to be involved in a “disturbing pipeline of exploiting children and other victims and survivors of sex trafficking.”

Pornhub has vehemently denied the allegations the petition and its proponents are putting forward, saying in a statement to The Guardian, “Pornhub has a steadfast commitment to eradicating and fighting non-consensual content and under-age material. Any suggestion otherwise is categorically and factually inaccurate.”

The company also went on the defensive to Fox News, whom it told: “Pornhub has actively worked to put in place state-of-the-art, comprehensive safeguards across its platform to combat and remove all unauthorized content that breaches the platform’s policies. This includes employing an extensive team of human moderators dedicated to manually reviewing every single upload….In addition, we have a robust system for flagging, reviewing and removing all illegal material, age-verification tools.”

That all may be true, but clearly the human-moderator team needs to be made more extensive if Pornhub wants to rid its platform of illegal content. And, as the adult industry knows only too well, illegal content has always been the backbone of Pornhub—and all MindGeek tube sites. If the company were to truly crack down on all the content uploaded without creator and/or performer consent, there wouldn’t be a whole lot left.