The Battle Tactic That Will Shut Down Pornhub

My new book on Pornhub’s reckoning, Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking, teaches that to stop online sex trafficking, we must eliminate profitability.

Sex trafficking, to put it simply, is the commercialization of sexual abuse. It is rape for profit. So how do we stop it? We eliminate profitability.

In Takedown, I uncover the complicity of Pornhub’s owners and executives in the global distribution and monetization of rape and sex trafficking. Pornhub’s pursuit of profit through these means shatters countless victims’ lives, including those of children.

The story begins in the early hours before dawn on February 1, 2020, as I was rocking my crying baby. I was thinking about the haunting story of a 15-year-old girl from Broward County, Florida, who had been missing for a year before being found after a Pornhub user told her mother that he had recognized her daughter on the site. In fact, fifty-eight online videos showed the girl being raped for profit. One question was unrelenting: How had these filmed sex crimes ended up on Pornhub, the world’s largest and most popular porn site, with 47 billion visits per year?

After my baby went back to sleep, I pulled out my computer to test what it took to upload a video to Pornhub. I discovered that it only took an email address to post a video in minutes — anonymously. At that time, the site had over fifty million videos and images, all of which had been uploaded without verifying the age or consent of those in the content. That alarming moment was the catalyst for what became the #Traffickinghub movement, which aims to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable.

The virality of the movement was stunning. As the petition I started to shut down Pornhub gained millions of signatures, numerous victims of Pornhub began to reach out to me to tell their stories. Many of them also wanted to pursue justice in court. At the same time, company insiders and whistleblowers contacted me to expose Pornhub. I learned how massive amounts of illegal content were being uploaded to the site, as well as why.

Here is what one seasoned company insider told me:

The headlines you are sharing and the campaign you started, it struck a chord in my conscience. I don’t think there is malicious intent on the lower levels of the company, but at the executive level they are clearly complicit and it’s for the sake of revenue. It’s just money. One hundred percent. Management just sees numbers — let’s be honest. It’s like any other company but they are trading with people’s lives…. Were we planning any efforts to stop the illegal content? Absolutely not. Because of views. Every time you put an extra layer of control on what goes up, you lose content. And content is more web pages, and more web pages are more Google search results and more Google results are more paid views.

Pornhub owners and executives purposefully designed the site to be unchecked — thereby enabling abuse — because they know that their financial success depends on having millions of searchable images and videos that can drive billions of visits to the site. The majority of Pornhub’s profit derives from selling 4.6 billion advertising impressions to advertisers daily. 

It quickly became evident that to confront and disrupt this system, we had to attack the very means through which Pornhub’s content was being monetized. With the assistance of many people and organizations, we urged the major credit card companies to cut ties with the site. After almost three years of battling, Visa, Mastercard, and Discover finally cut off transactions on Pornhub. 

We’ve also helped survivors hit Pornhub where it hurts — its bank account. Today, nearly three hundred victims are suing Pornhub and its parent company in twenty-five lawsuits across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. This includes multiple class-action lawsuits on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims. The potential damages total in the billions.

Since this battle to shut down Pornhub began, the company has been forced to take down 91 percent of its content due to the site being infested with unverified content and sexual crime. Pornhub has lost all its major advertisers, and both its CEO and COO have resigned. The company was sold in 2023 to a hastily concocted private equity firm called Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), which is now attempting to salvage the brand and whitewash its toxic reputation as a peddler of crime.

Legitimate user-generated websites invest heavily in technology, employees, and partnerships to address and prevent illegal content. Pornhub, on the other hand, has barely started to make changes after years of being globally exposed, sued, and losing its ability to process credit card payments. It is only just now, as of September 2024, beginning to verify the age and consent of the individuals in new videos and images uploaded to the site. However, to this day, the previously uploaded unverified content remains online. Any legitimate company would delete one hundred percent of unverified content from its website immediately.

The fight is not over yet, but we are closer than ever to seeing justice served. Only by ending impunity can we ensure that victims find closure and future abusers are deterred from following in Pornhub’s footsteps. 

When it comes to corporate trafficking, the story of Pornhub’s reckoning teaches us that eliminating profitability is the path to justice and change.

Laila Mickelwait is the co-founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, the Founder of the Traffickinghub movement supported by millions around the world, and the national bestselling author of Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking.

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