Pornhub Had 700,000 Videos Flagged for Potentially Criminal Content but Below Threshold for Review: Court Documents

‘The site needs to be shut down’ to deter future abusers, says founder of Traffickinghub Movement

The Pornhub website is shown on a computer screen in Toronto on Dec. 16, 2020. The Canadian Press

Pornhub reviewed videos flagged for potentially criminal content like child sexual abuse only for those that received over 15 complaints, and the website had over 700,000 videos with between 1 and 15 flags in 2021, a series of emails reveals. The documents were disclosed as part of a class action lawsuit against the company’s Montreal-based parent company filed by 40 women in California in 2021.

“Team reviews between 50 and 500 videos per day that are flagged in order to address any video with more than 15 flags,” said part of an e-mail from May 27, 2020, exchanged between executives at Pornhub and its parent company MindGeek, which was recently renamed Aylo.

“So basically a video with 15 flags is never viewed,” said a portion of another e-mail on the same day.

The partially redacted e-mails were made public as part of the disclosure in the California lawsuit, which is seeking more than US$40 million in damages.

One of the e-mails from the same day in May 2020 states that the company had “706,425 videos that are active and have at least 1 flag (between 1 and 15 flags).”

However, they also reveal that at the time, the company only had one person working five days a week to review flagged videos.

Victims’ Testimonies

Laila Mickelwait, founder of the Traffickinghub Movement and CEO and founder of the Justice Defense Fund, posted some of the e-mails on X, formerly known as Twitter. She said the documents show Pornhub’s practices were worse than she had thought.

“You hear again and again that these victims were reaching out to Pornhub, begging for their videos to be taken off the site,” Ms. Mickelwait told The Epoch Times.

But the e-mails give a more detailed picture of the company’s practices, she added.

“A victim of child rape on Pornhub could have flagged their own video 15 times, and it wouldn’t even be looked at,” she said. “That level of complicity and child sexual abuse and sexual crime, it’s a whole other level.”

The disclosed information sounds similar to what others have testified.

In June 2021, the parliamentary ethics committee released a report on Pornhub and similar sites containing stories of abuse survivors who had asked Pornhub to remove videos depicting their sexual abuse.

“Every survivor who testified described the difficulty of having Pornhub remove content despite warnings that it was non-consensual. Some stated that Pornhub was slow to respond or never responded to removal requests,” stated the report, titled “Ensuring the Protection of Privacy and Reputation on Platforms Such as Pornhub.”

“These survivors shared the trauma of having abusive images of them uploaded online without their knowledge or consent,” the report added. “Many explained that they had developed mental and physical illnesses that prevented them from functioning in their daily lives, and most had considered or attempted suicide.”

The report added that some videos garnered millions of views before being removed.

“Some survivors stated that even if their content was removed from Pornhub, it was re‑uploaded shortly afterward,” it said.

Rebrand

The California class action lawsuit, filed in February 2021, is one of a number of lawsuits MindGeek faces or has faced in the United States and Canada.

The suit claims the company “knowingly benefitted financially from thousands—if not millions—of videos to their various websites featuring victims who had not yet reached the age of majority,” which is age 18 in California.

The lawsuits, the parliamentary report, and news stories have since resulted in a major shakeup in the companies involved. MindGeek owns a number of other companies similar to Pornhub, including Brazzers, YouPorn, Men.com, and Trans Angels.

In December 2020, the company took down millions of videos that had been uploaded by unverified users in response to the allegations of showing child sexual abuse and other non-consensual sexual behaviour.

In a Dec. 14, 2020, news release, the company said it had “enacted the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history.”

The company CEO and COO both left in June 2022. Earlier this year, MindGeek was bought by an Ottawa-based private equity firm called Ethical Capital Partners.

And in August, MindGeek was renamed Aylo.

“The decision to rebrand the company as Aylo, comes in response to the need for a fresh start and a renewed commitment to innovation, diverse and inclusive adult content, and trust and safety,” the company said in an Aug. 17 news release.

The news release said the company now IDs every person who uploads content, and has engaged with more than 70 non=profit organizations globally to combat child sexual abuse material and non-consensual content.

To Ms. Mickelwait, it’s too little, too late.

“The site needs to be shut down in order to be a deterrent for future abusers and to say we will not tolerate this level of complicity in child sexual abuse and sex trafficking,” she said.

Aylo did not respond to an Epoch Times request for comment by publication time.