Pornhub Executive Says ‘Loophole’ Allows Rapists, Traffickers ‘Make a lot of Money’
An undercover reporter caught a Pornhub executive on camera admitting that rapists and human traffickers exploit a known “loophole” on the website to “make a lot of money.”
A journalist with Sound Investigations, Arden Young, went undercover to meet Mike Farley, a product manager at Pornhub for dinner, where he said that top executives at the company are well aware of the loopholes used by abusers and traffickers to upload illegal content of adult and underage rape victims.
Farley told Young that 10 years ago when he started at the company, he was one of a handful of employees and that the company now employs over 300 individuals.
The “loophole” Farley referred to, is when users upload a video with faces blurred, an immediate indicator that the person is not of age or has not consented to the footage being shared.
“How are you going to tell me who’s in that video if the girl’s not showing her face?” Farley asked. “That would be the loophole that I always, like, I look at that and I’m like, that’s stupid but everybody is just kinda rolling with it.” Farley said that several top executives at the company “roll with it” because “it costs money” to address the loophole.
When Young asked him who exploits the loophole, he responded, “Everyone. Because you make a lot of money.” She asked if that meant rapists use it too, to which he said, “Of course. Of course.”
Despite Pornhub publicly stating that the website doesn’t knowingly allow child sex abuse material to be shared, Farley admitted that several videos of abuse “slip through the cracks,” and in fact, C-Suite executives choose to turn a blind eye.
“We’ve brought it up to the CPO and we’ve brought it up to the CLO, and they’re both telling us ‘it’s all good.'” Farley said. “They would lose a lot of money,” he added, claiming that “It would be counterintuitive” to the business to remove the content.
“You basically don’t want to make your company more compliant than it has to be, right? Because then it’s just wasted money,” Farley told Young. “Like, not only does it cost money to make it compliant, but you’re reducing the income because of that too.”
Pornhub is referred to as a “tube” site because it allows users to upload videos after creating an account. To upload videos, users need to submit a government-issued ID verifying their age; however, allowing users to blur faces within the videos prevents the company from verifying the ages of those in the images and videos.
Lawsuit Finds Child Abuse Content had to be Flagged 15 Times before being Reviewed by Pornhub
Pornhub, and its parent company Mindgeek, have accumulated several lawsuits over the years from individuals whose abusive material was allowed to remain on the platform for extended periods of time.
Most recently, a lawsuit filed against Mindgeek in California claimed: “for more than a decade, MindGeek has knowingly received and distributed child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and benefitted financially from child sex trafficking on its network of wildly popular pornography websites.”
The lawsuit’s discovery phase found that the “only way” videos with potential abuse would be reviewed by Pornhub would be if users flagged the content 15 times or more, only then would the video enter the queue. Videos flagged would take another 72 hours to review.
More than 706,425 active videos on the website were flagged between one and 15 times, meaning hundreds of thousands of videos have yet to be reviewed by the website. The lawsuit also discovered that Pornhub only employs one person, who works five days a week, to review all flagged content. The former Mindgeek CEO said in an email that the process for content review “seems good and reasonable.”
“Partially redacted 2020 emails show conversations between MindGeek executives and senior personnel on how to respond to a Mastercard inquiry flagging suspected child pornography on the site, by sending them a hyperlink and asking about their protocols.“
“‘Let’s NOT poke MC,’ the redacted MindGeek CEO, who at the time was founder Feras Antoon, said in a May 27 email chain. ‘This is very frustrating cuz imagine they are planning to shut us down.'”
“The CEO, who stepped down last year, asked, ‘Can we say, it slipped through? … The question is precise? What did u do verify age. They are aware we don’t do that to UGC [user-generated content].'”
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Pornhub has also run into roadblocks in states where new legislation requires pornographic websites to verify the age of users before allowing access to view the material uploaded. Utah was the first state to pass a law requiring websites sharing adult content to verify that users were above the age of 18. In response, Pornhub opted to block all users in the state of Utah rather than comply with the law. The website now blocks users in Mississippi and Virginia which adopted similar policies soon after Utah.
Last week, a federal judge blocked a law in Texas that would have required Pornhub to ask all users for a government-issued ID before accessing uploaded content, calling it a restriction on free speech.
