Business Insider reports on a lawsuit by a mother whose 14-year-old son’s rapist uploaded a video of the abuse to Pornhub, which was subsequently watched over 150,000 times.
In the civil suit against MindGeek, the plaintiffs allege that MindGeek’s Pornhub provided “assistance, platform, content mandates, and edits” to Franklin in order to generate “the maximum amount of views and drove the maximum volume of traffic for the mutual benefit of the Defendants and their unlawful scheme.”
The suit also alleges that MindGeek “never informed the authorities about the identity of Defendant Franklin, the fact he posted child sexual violence or the fact that child sexual violence was being utilized on their platforms for profit to their mutual benefit.”
This is not an isolated incident. In 2020, Nicholas Kristof wrote a report for the New York Times on how MindGeek, which owns Pornhub, was platforming child pornography.
Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.
As well as acts of rape, Kristof gave examples of teenagers who were videoed during consensual acts — sometimes they gave their consent to be recorded, and sometimes they didn’t. In each case, the footage was then posted to Pornhub without permission. Kristof concluded that “the issue is not pornography but rape.” Really, the issue is both.