Pornhub is under fire from anti-trafficking activists who found evidence of child porn and human trafficking facilitated through relaxed verification of the identity of people permitted to uploading videos.
Laila Mickelwait theorizes that the availability of child porn and human trafficking on Pornhub may be due to the lack vetting for those who can post videos to the site.
Pornhub allows anyone to upload videos so long as they submit an email and a verification. The verification process involves users writing on paper what their handle is and uploading a photo of themselves holding that piece of paper. There is no government identification required, or any other kind of photo identification.
In this instance, a verified child “model” was featured in rape porn videos available on Pornhub.
Tweets by Pornhub, which acknowledged featuring and marketing 58 videos of one child rape victim on the website, have since been removed. These tweets had already been cached on the internet.
Pornhub actually admitted multiple times that they verified the 15yr old girl who was raped and trafficked on their site and subsequently deleted all of the tweets but all of them were cached. pic.twitter.com/dXvOkRsdce
— Laila Mickelwait (@LailaMickelwait) February 10, 2020
This is seemingly the first time Pornhub acknowledged that an underaged model was verified by Pornhub.
In another story that came out again this week, another girl had a difficult time contacting Pornhub when asking them to remove a video of a sexual assault that occurred when she was a minor.
At the age of 14, Rose Kalemba was kidnapped while walking in her neighborhood alone before dinner. Rose was then taken to a house where she was raped and beaten while being recorded over a period of 12 hours.
By time Rose filed a police report, videos of her rape were uploaded to Pornhub and viewed over 400,000 times. Rose learned of the video of the assault while scrolling through her MySpace feed.
“The titles of the videos were ‘teen crying and getting slapped around,’ ‘teen getting destroyed,’ ‘passed out teen.’ One had over 400,000 views,” Rose recounts. “The worst videos were the ones where I was passed out. Seeing myself being attacked where I wasn’t even conscious was the worst.”
Rose sent emails to Pornhub requesting they remove the videos due to them being made against her consent and while she was a minor.
“I sent Pornhub begging emails. I pleaded with them. I wrote, ‘Please, I’m a minor, this was assault, please take it down.'”
Pornhub refused to reply and the videos remained on the website until they received an email appearing to be sent from a lawyer threatening legal actions and “within 48 hours the videos disappeared.”
Due to high demand, a change.org petition was created by Mickelwait, calling for Pornhub to be shut down.