But combined with MindGeek’s monopolistic hold on the porn industry and its decade-long history of pirated content harming sex workers, there’s ample enough reason to ditch Pornhub. Pornhub didn’t create these videos, and the site eventually pulled its partnership with Girls Do Porn. Some models claim they were forced to continue performing through painful sex scenes or else “they wouldn’t be paid,” according to NBC 7. It remains unclear whether these clips were shot with the performers’ consent. One woman who spoke to Motherboard said she has been shunned by family members, while another reportedly contemplated suicide, committed self-harm, and had to drop out of college to avoid harassment.
In reality, their onscreen sex scenes were shared online, including preview clips on Pornhub and full videos available as part of subscription-based Pornhub Premium service.Īfter Girls Do Porn posted the videos, several stars were outed, doxed, and harassed. That same month, 22 women filed a lawsuit against Girls Do Porn, claiming the company misled them into thinking their adult performances would be sent to “private collectors” across the world in Australia and New Zealand. In June 2019, Motherboard’s Samantha Cole and Emanuel Mailberg broke a story on Girls Do Porn, an adult video production company that serves as one of Pornhub’s many content partners. It remains unclear whether these changes will improve Pornhub’s content ecosystem, let alone if the company will change its relationship toward sex workers. The company is supposedly moving away from this model, instead limiting all Pornhub uploads to “content partners and people within the Model Program,” the site wrote in December 2020. In 2019, this reporter spoke with several sex workers who alleged Pornhub notoriously hosts pirated material. Pornhub certainly has real problems with how it treats sex workers. “Stuck in the predictable pushback to anti-porn ‘puritans,’ the possibilities for challenging Pornhub’s business model-and the working conditions and the exploitation it enables-could be lost.” “There is no question that Pornhub sits at the crux of two bad ideas: a race-to-the-bottom gig economy and a tech-determinist business model that values stickiness and seamlessness over content moderation,” she writes.
The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant criticized both Exodus Cry and Kristof, arguing Exodus Cry and its conservative Christian sister organizations value “the ideology of eradicating sex work over the lives of sex workers and so rejects worker-led organizing, along with public health and harm-reduction approaches to addressing labor and sexual abuse.”
In fact, most of the article’s talking points come from notorious anti-LGBTQ conservative Christian organization Exodus Cry and its “Traffickinghub” campaign.
Pornhub has far less child sexual abuse material than social media companies such as Facebook, according to sex worker Ashley Lake. Pornhub experienced extensive backlash in December 2020 after the New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof published an opinion column claiming the site “ off videos of exploitation and assault.” So it’s finally time to ditch the site for good and explore Pornhub alternatives. There are more than enough reasons to avoid Pornhub, but here’s one more reason: MindGeek’s tube site hosts videos that enable doxing and harassment. This article features explicit and triggering sexual content.