[rhythmic bongo drum music playing]
[interviewer] Do you remember the first porn you ever saw?
It was at a sleepover. I was with a girlfriend.
And at, like, 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. something special came on.
Here you are, Cinderella. Don't be fooled by your stepsisters again.
[woman continues] It was, like, this Mother Goose porn.
She would, like, tell you a fairy tale, and you would see them reenacting it.
I remember either HBO or Cinemax having, like, those late-night erotic movies,
and I remember one of the first ones that I saw,
it was two women together, and I'm like, "Two women can do that?"
- [woman moaning] - ['80s music playing]
In college, some of my downstairs neighbors
had a whole DVD
of Julia Ann and Janine Lindemulder.
One of their classic Blondage films, where they were using an ice dildo,
and maybe because it's all I had...
[laughs] ...or maybe because it's an amazing film,
it was what I watched
and then what I thought about for many years.
[man] My aunt had a copy of Playgirl, and I tore out all the pages.
And when you see something like that that connects with you,
it makes you realize
who you are.
I mean, the sex is almost immaterial.
[woman 2] I was eleven, and I went onto Pornhub,
and I wanted to be surprised, and I really was.
The first piece of pornography that I watched was
an eight-person geriatric gang bang.
[man] Just what she needs.
Which did kind of set the tone
for how extreme things could be on the Internet.
[woman 3] I think what makes porn "porn" is that
you watch it expecting to be sexually aroused in some way.
I think that's my entire definition of it.
- [interviewer] That's very broad. - Yeah.
So, like, I mean, anything can be porn.
There is pressure on Ottawa and Quebec
to act tonight after alarming allegations surface...
Pornhub is one of the most profitable and powerful websites...
[man] Thirty women are now suing Pornhub's parent company, MindGeek.
[woman] The New York Times column accused the porn site...
[woman 2] ...of profiting off the sexual exploitation of women.
[woman 3] Mastercard says they might stop...
[man] This isn't about porn. This is about rape.
Pornhub is not a porn site. It's a crime scene.
[ambient electronic music playing]
[woman 1] So MindGeek owns Pornhub,
and I worked there for three years in various positions.
I just Googled, actually,
"Porn scriptwriter, is that a job?"
And it was.
And MindGeek was hiring, and I applied
and I moved to Montréal.
[ethereal music playing]
Most people think Pornhub is the biggest or most visited porn site on the Internet,
which in terms of brand recognition, is true.
It's the one people talk about when they talk about the porn industry.
But MindGeek is a hilariously boring office space.
Gray carpet, gray cubicle, open-concept kind of thing.
It was really just like working at a tech company.
I think it was more appealing to the executives
to be executives at a very successful tech company
than a very successful porn company.
[dramatic electronic music playing]
[man] So MindGeek has a number of adult companies.
Pornhub is its main platform.
Brazzers does production.
And there are a host of other tube sites,
like Redtube or Xtube that are owned under the MindGeek umbrella.
MindGeek came from outside the industry.
They were really a technology platform. They didn't produce adult content,
so they didn't have to have any relationships with studios,
they just had to create a platform where people could share content.
And that was the promise of Pornhub.
[woman] ...watchin' Spice.
[Stabile] In pre-Internet porn,
you try to keep as low a profile as possible
because you didn't want the feds coming after you,
you didn't want people really focusing attention on you,
you didn't want to make waves.
But Pornhub knew that if they were gonna capture market share on a global level,
they had to make waves.
And with the Internet, you blew that wide open.
- [computer key clicks] - [music stops]
[dial-up modem dialing]
[modem whirring, beeping]
[dial-up whirring continues]
[retro computer game music playing]
So, when the Internet was first developed...
[keyboard clicking]
the only kind of pornography was, like, ASCII art,
where somebody painstakingly went and drew titties
out of semicolons and periods and stuff like that,
and it would take forever to download because bandwidth was so low.
Eventually bandwidth improved,
and that gave way to people uploading scans
of pornographic images and videos to share them.
[Stabile] Consumers learned that they didn't have to buy
a $90 DVD and only get four scenes.
They learned that they could have
an endless amount of content for 19.99 a month.
But the Internet was suspicious.
People were afraid that, "If I put this on the Internet, it will be stolen."
In some cases that came true.
[Perdue] We started to see an evolution of people distributing content
that they didn't have a right to.
Especially compared to the 1960s, where porn piracy would be
leaving a porn magazine in the woods for somebody to find, you know,
and maybe a group of six teenagers would find it in the woods,
and you would make their day.
Tube sites like Pornhub were very disruptive to the porn industry
in the exact same way that Pirate Bay was disruptive to the film industry
and LimeWire was disruptive to the music industry.
People started to expect to get things for free very easily.
Pornhub wasn't necessarily the one driving that,
but Pornhub absolutely was a part of this... this movement.
[man] In 2008, Pornhub was becoming pretty much omnipresent.
And so, at the time, I had obviously a very negative opinion about Pornhub
because they were the ones that were taking away the money.
[woman] I was not pleased with Pornhub early on.
Piracy was a massive issue,
and at the time, there wasn't a way to monetize my own content on Pornhub.
I-- I couldn't sell it on there.
It was just a game of Whac-A-Mole
getting my stolen stuff taken down constantly.
[man] Pornhub came out of the fruits of three Concordia students
who, like any other university students, apparently liked naked women.
And they started this thing off, essentially, as a lark.
But they sold the company in 2010
to a guy named Fabian Thylmann,
and he wrapped it into his empire.
And, to his credit, Fabian knew all about search engine optimization
to make sure that it was Pornhub that was at the top when you searched.
[Perdue] Anything that has a lot of traffic,
you can assume is really taking advantage
of search engine optimization
or the game of trying to get
your page first.
When somebody searches, like,
"big titties,"
Pornhub wants "Pornhub big titties" to be number one
and ideally number two, number three, number four, number five, number six.
[woman] Pornhub fundamentally changed porn distribution
and porn production as a result.
Studios that were very used to having certain budgets and certain returns
all of a sudden found most, if not all, of their content disposable
and it becoming much more of a volume game.
[Stabile] By 2011, studios started to realize
that it was better to partner with them.
[music stops]
[Stabile] And in 2012, Fabian Thylmann was suddenly giving the keynote
at a major industry conference.
I'm hoping that my openness throughout the speech
will be beneficial to all of you, and some will understand a bit more
of how we do things and why we do things certain ways.
And why we're quite friendly people, although we own tube sites.
So let's get back a bit and look at
what the industry had to face over the past few years.
I think the industry faces a lot of change often.
I think it's normal that we do
because we have always been more or less at the forefront of technology.
And therefore face the negative change and the positive change at the same time.
[keyboard clicks]
[Patriquin] First time I wrote about it, I had no idea
there was a connection between Pornhub and MindGeek.
That one company owned the other.
MindGeek itself is basically a data-harvesting operation.
This is a company that does exactly what Netflix does, what Facebook does.
It gathers data on its users
to better tailor content towards those eyeballs.
And they're extremely good at it. In fact, better at it than Netflix
because they have that much more to build an algorithm around.
And, of course, being able to monetize user-generated content
with advertising was extremely profitable.
But then Thylmann was convicted of tax evasion,
and the assets were bought by MindGeek employees
by the name of Feras Antoon and David Tassillo
and a guy named Bernd Bergmair, who was an investor.
And they were very successful in pushing Pornhub
to the very, sort of, outer limits of mainstream acceptance.
As usual, when we need a little emotional uplift, we know where to turn.
Pornography.
[audience laughter]
Specifically, the largest porn site on the Internet, Pornhub.
Though many of you can probably get there by just typing 'P' into your browser.
[audience laughs]
- I found the whole movie on Pornhub. - [audience chuckles]
- Uh... I don't wanna-- - I don't know what you're talking about.
[audience laughs]
It's sort of a hub for porn. Um...
They were really great about brand recognition.
They bought billboards in Times Square knowing they would be controversial
and knowing they could benefit from all the earned media that comes with that.
We did a lot of collaborations with celebrities like Kanye.
Pornhub is pop-- I mean, I think in our heads
most people could even see the colors
or hear the song.
[Pornhub intro playing]
[mouse clicks]
[Pornhub intro playing]
[mouse clicks]
- [plays Pornhub intro on drums] - [students cheering]
For the last 15 years, I would say, by far, it's the most household name.
[woman] So I had a page, and I had, like, millions of viewers,
and I'm like, "Well, no wonder why people are noticing me
in the train station, when I go flying. No wonder.
Sixteen million people have seen my asshole."
Pornhub released their annual report
of the top pornographic searches in the country.
They broke it down by state, and the results are very interesting.
In Arkansas, for instance, the number one most searched porn word was "divorced,"
which might be the saddest thing I've ever heard.
Pornhub insights got a tremendous amount of media attention.
Their big push was always these end-of-year data numbers
where they would list the number of videos,
the top stars, the top search terms.
"Lesbian" has now dropped down to number three and "MILF" to number four...
[Stabile] It went into everybody's homes,
and it got people talking about things that were scandalous beforehand.
I think that was one of the things that later made Pornhub a target.
Some people don't like that these things are not in the shadows.
- They want this stuff hidden. - [chanting] Shut it down!
[Stabile] And, of course, the arguments are not new.
It's just the medium that they're battling has changed.
[chanting] Shut it down!
[Stabile] And so we started to hear the drum beat
of people coming for Pornhub from outside the industry.
[Perdue] It's really interesting to see, on a very wide scale,
people trying to remove pornography from the Internet.
It feels almost like ripping the spine out of something, you know,
given how much every element of the Internet
has been influenced and led by pornography.
It-- It's just creating this
absolutely, like, untenable tension
between the two industries that-- that actually exist so tight-knit.
And the people who often get left in the dust
are primarily sex workers,
primarily performers,
and also users
trying to exist as a person with a sex drive online.
And it just becomes a precedent for great censorship
that we see over and over and over again,
unreasonably applied to the most vulnerable people.
[wistful piano music playing]
[interviewer] Do you consent to how you look in the interview?
Yes, thank you for showing me. I was curious. [inhales]
- [interviewer] Cool. Do you wanna slate? - I would.
- [interviewer] Rolling. - [crew 1] Speeding.
[crew 2] Uh, Gwen interview, series AB, common mark, marker.
My name is Gwen Adora, and I am an adult performer,
an online content creator, semi-influencer,
babe. [laughs]
Uh, that's who I am.
I definitely identify as a sex worker.
That's not the first thing I say to people 'cause I feel like it's such a broad term.
I don't necessarily say that upfront.
But that's something I identify as, like, politically and job-wise.
The words "porn star" or "sex worker" doesn't really associate with my body type
for a lot of people.
So a lot of people are generally like,
"Oh! I didn't, like, realize fat women could do porn!"
♪ I've got a perfect body ♪
♪ But sometimes I forget ♪
People assume that, like, I'm in it for, like,
the wrong reasons.
They're like, "Oh, you're doing something that's, you know, taboo and underground
and shouldn't be talked about, but we'll definitely jerk off to it."
People automatically assume I'm doing mainstream porn
just because that's the immediate connection,
that's what people know the most of.
Um, but in reality, I'm just in my room by myself making little videos.
Just like a YouTuber, basically.
[ambient music playing]
[Adora] On a typical filming day, I would get ready,
do my makeup, set up my tripod.
[camera beeps]
And then the clothes start coming off.
[sighing] Oh my God, what a crazy night on that dance floor.
I didn't expect to be getting that wild this vacation.
[sighs] Oh my God, take a moment.
Take my shoes off. [groans]
[sighs]
Oh!
Hi, you!
You... You look familiar.
You're in... You were in my...
my communications class last semester.
I taught you.
[interview] So I do photography, I do videography, I do editing.
Come on. No one is watching.
You're on vacation, get it out.
Do it.
[interview] I do marketing, PR.
Oh, do you wanna see Miss Adora's tits?
I do it all.
I basically do, like, a whole, like, media company's jobs,
all in one person, for myself. [laughs]
It's a lot. And yes, there is some masturbating on camera sometimes.
Oh! So fucking good. Mm-hmm?
Are you gonna come on my big fucking titties?
Actually, wait. We're gonna do this before that.
[interview] This is my lube shooter.
Oh! There we go. Come on. Come on, baby.
Yeah, come on! Come on! [groaning]
Oh fuck! Oh...
Oh my God. [gasps]
So sticky.
It does add, like... [chuckles] ...a lot of time to the...
the process of making your own content.
But, um, the great thing about it is I get to control the whole thing.
I can control the narrative. Choose the scenes that I take on.
I don't have to perform with someone I don't wanna perform with.
[water gushing]
[Adora] I get to edit it the way I want. I get to promote it the way I want to.
I am Gwen Adora full-time. It's my full-time job,
which is great because, you know, um, not everyone has the same opportunities
for mainstream porn, but yeah, anyone can do amateur.
Which is lovely.
Pornhub was a site that I initially stayed away from.
There was a lot of free videos that were stolen.
So I was, kind of, on my smaller niche sites.
It wasn't until I went to the AVN Expo in Vegas
that I was pulled aside by Jade Jordan,
who was at the Modelhub booth there.
She came up to me, and she was like, "You need to be on Pornhub."
"You're gonna be the next big BBW on Pornhub."
BBW is 'big beautiful woman.' And so, I was like, "Okay, tell me more."
She gave me a good introduction to, you know, how to monetize the site.
I had no clue that they had Modelhub at the time,
which was the pay-per-video side of the platform to sell them.
That's amazing.
And, tied with the traffic of Pornhub,
I was like, "That sounds like a win-win to me."
It wasn't until XBIZ Miami, when I met Noelle,
who was, at the time, working in the Modelhub department.
She'd reached out through email and said,
"Hey, we want you to come to this Modelhub dinner."
[women squealing]
[Perdue] I met Gwen through the model program.
I started with Modelhub in talent acquisitions.
We met because I was scoping out models on other sites that are doing really well
and being like, "Hey, like, what about us?"
[Adora] They took us all out for food and drinks
and told us how we were doing on the platform
and then also tips and tricks on how to fully utilize the system.
So Modelhub is Pornhub's clip site.
It launched in 2018,
and that was really when verified models
started making money on the site.
[Adora] So I put more energy into it, and once I started doing that,
I noticed the benefits in terms of money
and in terms of following.
When I put my clips on Modelhub,
I didn't have to promote them for them to sell
because the Pornhub traffic that was filtering through,
because the sites were connected, was just automatic.
[music ends]
[background music plays through phone]
[DeVille] Before there was such an easy way
to monetize self-made content,
we, meaning performers,
were all at the mercy of studio-produced porn.
[music stops]
[DeVille] But these online platforms, like Modelhub and OnlyFans,
gave us autonomy, power, a good bit more money.
It has made financial freedom
very easy and accessible
for so many more models.
That model of, like, the fan subscription site
is, like, a complete game-changer.
I don't rely on income from studio shoots.
That's the reason I was able to buy a house.
I wouldn't have been able to reliably save up
to buy a house from doing studio work before.
[woman in movie groans, stops]
[Hudson] When I was shooting for a studio, I could make roughly four grand a month.
- [woman in movie] Just like that! Ah! - [man in movie] Ooh!
[Hudson] With Modelhub, I started getting well over ten grand.
Content creation has shown that performers have always been in charge,
and they can dictate what they want and what they don't want.
Without us, there would be no industry.
[man in movie groaning rhythmically]
[Perdue] Pornhub has evolved over the past ten or so years
to have multiple different ways of making money
and multiple different ways of distributing pornography.
There are a bunch of different levels in terms of how involved you wanna be
as somebody uploading content.
But the process of uploading a video to Pornhub is pretty similar
to uploading content to any other platform.
You'll choose the file that you wanna upload.
Give it a title, a description.
You can tag the people in the video if you want.
And then a certain number of tags for categorization within the site.
POV, BBW, big tits, creampie.
But some tags are banned because some of the kinky stuff
is harder for them to sell to, like, credit card processors.
[Perdue] In general, people tag their videos
with as many tags as they can
so that these search engines pick up on those terms
and show them to the consumer.
And after that, you hit 'publish.'
And then it lives on there.
[dark electronic music playing]
[Perdue] Of course, there are some categories, like "teen,"
which obviously are upsetting.
But there is a larger issue where "teen" in pornography
doesn't necessarily refer to teenagers.
It's more in reference to a body type.
Any petite performer would be categorized as teen.
Age doesn't necessarily play into that
as much as people think it does.
It feels like you're saying, like, "Oh, teen." You know?
It's hard to come up with a solution to tagging like that
that doesn't feel like you're policing people's sexuality
that they're allowed to have because they're a legal adult.
[Dahl] You know, we're providing entertainment
within the legal bounds for consenting adults
and within that buffet of pornographic content,
that adults, if they choose to consume it,
can choose anything.
But if you let just anyone upload anything,
you're going to get
anyone uploading anything.
And that's not okay.
Prior to December 2020, verification was mandatory
if you wanted to make any money on your content.
So you would have to go through the process of submitting your ID
and getting approved.
But if you didn't care about making money on the site,
you could just make an account with an email address,
and you could upload whatever you wanted.
But because verification wasn't mandatory for all,
people were still uploading content that wasn't theirs,
and also people were uploading content
that couldn't necessarily be traced back to somebody.
So, if something got uploaded that was not consensual,
it's very difficult to actually track that person down
and make sure that, you know, this doesn't happen again.
You know, we have been wanting strict verified-only users
from all of these tube sites for a long time.
We don't want other garbage people
on a site that we're putting our content on.
Many people within the company and many, many, many performers
have been advocating for mandatory verification for years.
And, generally, the response was,
"We're working on it. It's happening eventually."
"Sit tight." That kind of thing.
And that was said
throughout my time there, which was three years.
But the vast majority of Pornhub's content was unverified.
And content is how they make money.
[woman] With the free content,
you have a lot of people motivated by some really sick stuff.
I think I knew the name Pornhub because it's pretty much a household name.
It's just, sort of, like, I know what Kellogg's brand is.
Like, I just knew what it was.
And when I was at NCOSE, I first heard the name MindGeek.
NCOSE's the National Center on Sexual Exploitation,
and it's our mission to expose this interweb
of sexual exploitation and advocate for survivors.
Because it really is irrelevant what your faith background is,
what your political beliefs are.
Everyone can be unified on this issue that no one should be sexually exploited.
We've been researching Pornhub and MindGeek for years,
so I had tons of research,
I had delved into how the site worked,
I had countless screenshots of some of the more horrific things.
But the Trafficking Hub campaign completely changed the game.
[optimistic music playing]
Laila Mickelwait here with an update on the Trafficking Hub campaign.
A quick one. Um, things are moving along.
We continue to gain traction. A lot is happening behind the scenes.
[suspenseful music playing]
[people chanting] Shut it down! Shut it down! Shut it down!
[Pinter] It was just such a viral movement.
Shut it down!
It reached so many people that we had never reached before.
Laila Mickelwait, you know, she's just an ally in the movement,
but she had a special gift.
Today, I'm excited to announce the launch
of the Trafficking Hub crowdfunding campaign.
I'm just gonna be honest with you and frank about this,
we are taking on a mega corporation.
A company that's making hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
Much of which is on the backs of real victims.
Go to traffickinghub.com. Sign the petition.
Together we are going to shut this down.
We have reached 500,000 signatures.
We have recently sailed past
830,000 signatures on the petition.
This is truly a global movement.
We reached two million signatures
on the petition to shut down Pornhub
and to hold its executives accountable
for complicity in the sex trafficking,
the rape, the abuse, and the assault
of men, women, and children.
In the time I've been in porn, I've seen so many of these campaigns
come and go.
Pornhub is infested with videos
of the real rape and the trafficking of women and children.
[Akira] But Trafficking Hub was scary because it hit a lot of people.
It really, really got a lot of traction.
[chanting] Lock them up!
[Akira] It's really, really frustrating because they really often know
how to pull people in by, like, talking about these really sad stories
of actual sex trafficking.
But those stories have nothing to do with us as an industry.
[dramatic music playing]
[male narrator] Pornhub has become the global epicenter
of Internet pornography.
The company makes hundreds of millions of dollars through ad revenue,
data collection, and premium subscriptions,
and it's blatantly enabling and profiting
from rape, sexual abuse,
and child sex trafficking.
[Akira] Usually, when I see things like that,
it's like, "Ugh! Just wait for it to blow over," kind of thing.
But, in this case, it seemed like
it was, like, really making a big splash,
and, like, people in my personal life were texting me, like,
"Hey, is this true?"
"Does Pornhub allow child pornography?"
And it was scary to me that, like,
people in my real life were, like, questioning that.
[Pinter] All of the research and stuff that she brought to light,
many of us had been talking to each other about.
We tried to get the word out, but she had a special gift
for packaging it in a way that was so easy to understand.
And when seen on Twitter,
and someone's pointing out, "This is a real person."
Then the victims are coming forward and saying, "This is my video."
It shakes everyone up,
and that's what she was able to do that no one had done before.
And certainly because she was such a powerful advocate
on behalf of those victims coming forward
and speaking about this so eloquently,
it made room for us to articulate that in our cases.
So we are bringing sex trafficking claims
and alleging that Pornhub knows that there are traffickers
intentionally creating this content for their site
or knowingly distributing child pornography on their site.
They know that.
They're facilitating it intentionally because they know there's a demand for it.
They're marketing it.
All because they're profiting from it.
And so, knowingly profiting from sex trafficking
is what we believe they are liable for.
You have a 14-year-old girl saying,
"I was raped, and my rape has been on Pornhub for years."
"I've requested it be removed, and no one helped me."
"Not the police. Not the website."
For so long, no one has cared.
And then, finally, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nick Kristof,
saw the Trafficking Hub campaign and was concerned.
I spoke with him a few times and was able to point him in the right direction.
And I think he wasn't sure this could be as bad as it seemed.
But unfortunately, once you see the site
and once you see the evidence, you just can't deny it.
[Kristof] When I started reporting this, my hope was
that there would be nothing to write about.
That I'd look into it and, uh--
it would turn out to be murky or exaggerated
and that there really wasn't a story there.
But the more I looked,
the more I felt this was something
that the public should be aware of
and that if the public were aware of it,
you know, people would not like the idea
of a major company behaving in this way.
[papers rustling]
[Kristof] So I reached out to Pornhub pretty early on
to speak to the executives,
and Pornhub was not particularly responsive.
The CEO refused to speak to me.
But the more I explored,
the more aghast I became
because I found just too many cases of kids
whose worst moments were preserved in amber on Pornhub
in ways that were gonna be devastating for the rest of their lives.
It was about six months that I spent trying to get survivors to talk about it.
This is, uh... This is Serena, the woman I, uh...
The young woman I wrote about.
Serena Fleites was a young woman
who told me her story, which was just devastating.
At 14, she was an eighth grader
who had a crush on a boy who was a year older.
He asked her for a naked video,
and she sent him a naked video of herself.
He asked for another. She sent another. Another after that.
Then kids started looking at her and smirking.
Somebody put those videos on Pornhub.
One of them had 400,000 views.
She asked Pornhub to remove them.
Sometimes it did. Sometimes it didn't.
And when it did remove them,
then somebody else would immediately upload it again.
And Pornhub made money off this.
They ran ads on this.
That was what drove me to write this piece.
[subdued electronic music playing]
[Stabile] So in December 2020,
the New York Times ran an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof
called "The Children of Pornhub."
I read it the morning that it came out, and honestly, I thought,
"This is all smoke, no fire."
Um... And so, I-- I didn't think much of it at first.
[Kristof] "Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery, winking face of naughty,
the website that buys a billboard in Times Square
and provides snow plows to clear Boston streets."
"It donates to organizations fighting for racial equality
and offers steamy content free to get people through Covid-19 shutdowns."
"That supposedly 'wholesome Pornhub'
attracts 3.5 billion visits a month."
"More than Netflix, Yahoo, or Amazon."
"Pornhub rakes in money from almost three billion ad impressions a day."
"One ranking lists Pornhub
as the 10th most-visited website in the world."
"Yet there is another side of the company."
"Its site is infested with rape videos."
"It monetizes child rape..."
Obviously, in the ensuing days, I was wrong.
It became a phenomenon.
[Patriquin] The New York Times did what The New York Times does.
They have incredible resources.
They spent an inordinate amount of time
and did a character-driven column.
It was a bombshell.
[Perdue] I had left Pornhub at that point,
but I still work vaguely in the industry,
so obviously, I saw the article.
It was everywhere. It was shared with everyone.
Dozens of people sent it to me.
I remember seeing this Twitter kerfuffle on my phone
and all the people talking about this article
and then all the people responding, saying like, "This is bullshit."
[Dreams] I just thought of it as another attack.
You know, I have so many attacks, personally, that I'm like,
"I can't take on that attack right now. Let me handle my own stuff first."
[DeVille] It's a nightmare for us because when you present
two unrelated things as being closely related
in a paper that everyone's going to believe,
what happens?
Well, exactly what you think would happen. And exactly what did happen.
[music intensifies]
[DeVille] The public sees it, and they are outraged
because it is outrageous, and it is horrible,
and it is something that nobody wants.
And then they say,
"That is trash, and we need to eliminate it."
[Akira] They neglect to see that
sex work and sex trafficking are two completely different things.
Sex work, by definition, is done with consent,
and if it's not done with consent, it's rape.
It's illegal, it's, um...
unethical, and that's not what we do.
[Kristof] "I don't see any neat solution."
"But aside from limiting immunity
so that companies are incentivized to behave better,
here are three steps that would help."
"One. Allow only verified users to post videos."
"Two. Prohibit downloads."
"Three. Increase moderation."
"Siri Dahl, a prominent porn star who does business with Pornhub,
told me my three proposals are..."
"Insanely reasonable."
So Nick Kristof had contacted me
asking for an interview about Pornhub.
Ultimately, I told him everything I know to be true that is my experience.
I'm a survivor of abuse myself,
um, which I told Nick Kristof in our phone interview.
I... told him about my own experience with sexual abuse,
which happened before I was ever in the porn industry, and...
I also communicated to him, like, one of my favorite things
about the industry that I work in is the fact that we care about consent
and the fact that I have full bodily autonomy at all times
in this industry.
Like, there's no question in my mind about that, and there never has been.
One of the things I was very clear with him about
when he read those three steps is,
"This is what people in the porn industry have been asking for."
But if we admit that it's a moderation problem,
then we have to admit it's a problem that's Internet-wide, which it is.
Because there's far more instances of child sexual abuse material
being reported on, like, Facebook and mainstream social media
than there is on actual porn websites.
[Kristof] "If PayPal can suspend cooperation with Pornhub,
so can American Express, Mastercard, and Visa."
[Dahl] And when he outlined those steps, if he had said,
"Do you think it's reasonable for Pornhub
to lose their ability to process payments?"
I would have been like, "No."
'Cause it would be near impossible
for someone to upload illegal content
via a verified model account,
which is the only way it would have to be uploaded for them to sell it
using the payment processing on Pornhub.
So all it does is affect my ability
and the ability of people in my industry to make a living.
[music intensifies]
So Mastercard and Visa pulled their processing from Pornhub.
The idea that somebody was claiming, "Oh, children are being sold on your site
using credit cards,"
for a global brand like that, was like,
"We can't be associated with this. We can't have a whiff of this."
[Patriquin] So Pornhub came out and removed a bunch of content.
Which is not to say that those videos that they took down were non-consensual.
The vast majority of cases they probably weren't.
But less content equals less profit.
So, the fact that they did that when they did it,
suggests to me that that's the nuclear option.
You get rid of this stuff when it's absolutely necessary.
Before then, let it ride 'cause we're making money on it.
[Stabile] In some ways, they took on the wrong company.
Pornhub doesn't actually sell a whole lot of content directly on its site.
Most of the money that Pornhub made
came from banner advertising or affiliate sales,
neither of which require a credit card to operate on the platform.
So the people who really got hurt were individual performers.
The small people selling direct to the consumers
because that's where the consumers were.
Porn performers like me depend on platforms like Pornhub to pay...
You're taking food out of people's mouths.
This is how people pay their rent and pay their bills.
Mastercard pulling payment processing from Pornhub is not helping one victim.
...terrified that they're gonna do this to other sites...
...should have a right to post online and exist online.
Please listen to us.
We need to support sex workers. We need to--
People that are uploading child pornography
are not content creators.
[clamor of performers]
[woman] I got hired at MindGeek in August 2019,
and I transitioned to a role in HR in 2020.
The article came to my attention, when I went to work "virtually" that day,
um, everybody was talking about it.
Um, and...
I just remember wondering,
"How much of it is true?"
But, um,
there was really no way for me to know.
[somber music playing]
[Burgoyne] I was pretty reliant on what management was willing to say about it,
and it wasn't a whole lot.
All we were told was, "None of it's true."
But it's this big article in The New York Times,
and it's very hard to reconcile those things.
But I think what they were really responding to was the tone of the article.
How it was so accusatory
and painting them like they were doing it on purpose.
That was really the part that they
minded.
And that was really a shame because I think it would have been better
in that moment to give some guidance.
But I think they were hoping that
everything was gonna calm down and blow over.
Especially the big move bringing down all of that content.
Suddenly everybody was just super stressed out.
[anchor] The website Pornhub is promising to take action.
The first change includes allowing only verified users to upload content.
Secondly, they will ban downloading videos from the site,
and the third is to add more moderation.
[Burgoyne] So in January, they started to make some moves
and tried to diminish the number of people on staff.
And in February, they went to the hearing at the Canadian Parliament.
[tense music playing]
[music fades out]
[lo-fi piano music playing]
Today's meeting is televised and will be made available
via the House of Commons website.
Now pursuant to the motion adopted
by the committee on Friday, December 11th, 2020,
the committee is resuming its study on the protection of privacy
and reputation on platforms such as Pornhub.
[Patriquin] So the parliamentary hearings were held in winter 2021,
looking into issues of privacy around companies like MindGeek.
Basically, looking into MindGeek because MindGeek's Canadian,
and "What the hell's going on?"
Good afternoon. My name is Feras Antoon.
I'm the chief executive officer of Les Entreprises MindGeek Canada.
With me is David Tassillo, chief operations officer,
and Corey Urman,
vice president of product management, video-sharing platform.
As a leader in this industry, we share the committee's concern
about the spread of unlawful content online
and about the non-consensual sharing of intimate images.
It goes against everything we stand for at MindGeek and Pornhub.
So on December 14th,
80% of your content came down from your site.
Is that correct?
Uh, I don't know about 80%,
but yes, a large portion of unverified-user-uploaded content
was removed.
Illegal content?
No. I said unverified uploaders.
That's the-- We only have content today from verified uploaders.
The content we removed is because we do not have--
It was uploaded by people who were not verified.
Do you have a specific number on the amount of content that was removed?
[Antoon] I would s--
It's in the ballpark of nine to ten million.
And we're making it so that we want everyone that uploads to our site
to basically have a... We want to have ID on them,
so we know who they are, so we can add further deterrents
to them doing illegal activity, and we hope
people that are providing adult entertainment
and any form of entertainment for people in the world follow our lead.
Has MindGeek or any of its at least 48 subsidiaries
ever monetized child sexual abuse and non-consensual material?
Our standards are very clear. We won't allow anything to do with CSAM.
We want nothing to do with non-consensual.
It is possible that people committing crimes
are able to circumvent our systems,
similar to security on a home or security at a bank.
You put multiple levels of security in place and deterrents in place,
but if a criminal wants to commit a crime, they will try and circumvent the system.
We are constantly adding new systems and better systems
and trying to further it,
to not only deter but to stop.
This has been a constant evolution in our company.
We were, um... had human moderation available on our sites
when it was a word that wasn't even-- It didn't even exist.
When Facebook and any of the other main platforms in the world never used it.
These were all things that we started. We weren't public about it,
but these are things we did since the beginning.
[Perdue] There were moderators.
I don't really know how that worked.
I know that there was
more content being uploaded onto the site, so I actually can't talk, really.
This is really getting into shady legal territory for me here.
- [interviewer] Okay. - Um...
[interviewer] To start, can you just tell me why you've decided
to share your story?
[voice disguised] Oh, uh...
I think the company could have done more
to prevent certain things
and chose not to.
And only really changed some things after it got in trouble.
[tense electronic music playing]
[voice disguised] I was a moderator. I worked for less than two years.
Some of the moderation happened in Canada.
Most of it happened in Cyprus.
When I worked there, there was a little over 30 moderators.
Every moderator had to review, um, 700 videos per day,
but it was expected for us to do more.
[Pinter] Each of these moderators were tasked with viewing
800 to 1,000 videos per eight-hour shift.
And that's impossible.
So, of course, they were fast-forwarding, skipping through.
No sound, which is key because sometimes
the women and-- or children in the video are crying, yelling,
saying, "No," saying, "Stop," and they're not catching any of that.
[moderator] We were scrubbing through videos as fast as we could.
Even if we thought that we were being diligent with our work,
we would still miss a few videos every now and then.
[Pinter] They proudly boasted that every single video is reviewed.
But, to put it in perspective,
Pornhub has traffic similar to these big social media websites.
Ninth, you know, most-trafficked website in the world, conservatively.
Facebook had 15,000 moderators,
and that was for a site that isn't primarily centered
around sexually explicit content, right?
And they still have 15,000 moderators who, we find out, are very overwhelmed.
[moderator] I can't really tell from a video the age of somebody.
It's a really hard thing to determine if a 17 year old is more than 18.
They could be 14 or they could be 19.
Basically, we would just guess,
then my manager would decide if the video would be
taken down for good or if it will go live again.
The rules constantly changed.
[woman] When you're operating a business like a pornography website,
you just have to have incredibly stringent compliance, content moderation,
and user restrictions involved in that.
I can't overstate that enough, especially when it's an online business.
So NCMEC is a private, nonprofit organization.
We have a very basic mission, which is to help find missing children,
reduce child sexual exploitation, and prevent child victimization.
[keyboard clattering]
We've a lot of companies and nonprofit organizations
that report to us.
So a survivor very well might be working with an organization
and say, "My image, my video, is here, on Pornhub, on another website."
And we would facilitate that nonprofit making a report on that incident
on behalf of the client or survivor that they're working with.
[Pinter] So a survivor came to us with what happened to her.
She went on a date with someone who was much older.
She was a minor.
He drugged and raped her and filmed her.
And the next thing you know, the video is on Pornhub.
She requested multiple times over the years to have it removed.
But the whistleblower we spoke to
actually said that they would have a backlog of, like, six months.
[moderator] We have thousands of take-down requests.
We don't really go through them in time.
Many videos that should have been taken down
stayed up for months.
[Souras] So there is a US law that requires online companies
that are defined as an electronic service provider
to report apparent child pornography to NCMEC
when they become aware of it on their platform.
There are over 1400 companies registered with NCMEC.
From Microsoft, to Facebook, to Google, to Dropbox, to Snapchat, to Twitter,
all of these companies are registered with NCMEC.
And MindGeek registered to report to NCMEC in March 2020.
But the reporting statute only applies to US companies.
So international companies have no obligation to register with NCMEC,
to report child sexual abuse, uh, material
to our CyberTipline or to have any involvement with us whatsoever.
[Pinter] What Pornhub would do when NCMEC would request a takedown is...
In any other circumstance, if child pornography was on a website,
and the website was alerted, and they took it down,
and you tried to go to that link, to that exact web address,
it either wouldn't be there or it'd say, "Page doesn't exist" or "Error."
For Pornhub, you would see the entire page.
The video would just be disabled, and it would have a message that says,
"Video is removed at the request of NCMEC."
But all the metadata would be there.
So you would see the title, the history of all the comments over the years,
you'd see how many views it had, and you would see related videos.
So, "Oh, you were searching for this young, abused teen video?"
"Well, unfortunately, this was removed by NCMEC,
but don't worry, we have all of these similar videos."
And so, not only would they keep people on their site,
but that would still be generating data and hits on all those terms and keywords.
So they lost nothing in terms of SEO by removing that.
So they're actually still profiting from this known child pornography
even when they disable the video.
And all the while, it's being distributed to the masses,
never to be removed again.
Because that's the truth.
Once this is on the Internet, it's almost impossible to remove.
These websites face no accountability, no requirements.
They are not motivated to remove content,
and so even if you get some websites to remove,
others are going to distribute it.
Serena, thank you so much for being willing to come to our committee
and to tell your story.
Uh, we'll start with you.
I... I had messaged Pornhub to get the video taken down.
I pretended to be my mother.
And I said, "Hey, this is my daughter. She's only 14 now."
"Uh, this is child pornography. Please take this down."
And they, you know, they wrote-- It took like a week or two to respond,
and then once they finally responded, they're like, "Okay, we'll take it down."
And then proceeded to wait another two weeks
before they finally did take it down.
And, um, doing my research, I was told that, uh,
that they had a system in place
that when a video was labeled as "child pornography" on their site,
that it was, like, flagged and tagged
and that it could no longer be re-uploaded.
Um, but of course, that wasn't true
because a week after it had been taken down,
it had been re-uploaded again.
And it'd always be uploaded over and over and over again.
No matter how many times I got it taken down,
it'd be right back up again.
[sniffs] So that was the whole reason I ended up reaching out to Mike.
Thank you. Um... I'll just introduce myself briefly to the committee.
My name is Michael Bowe.
Uh, I'm a partner in Manhattan at the law firm of Brown Rudnick.
[dramatic music playing]
[anchor] More than 30 women have filed a lawsuit against Pornhub.
The women are accusing the adult website
of running a "criminal enterprise" and exploiting them for profit.
[continues via phone] Lawyer Michael Bowe represents the women taking on MindGeek.
He spent the past year building a civil case against the company,
citing racketeering laws
ordinarily reserved for mobsters and drug gangs.
[Bowe] This is an organization that deals with legitimate porn,
of which there is a... You can make a fortune.
Uh, but that wasn't enough.
They incorporated into that business
child porn, trafficked porn, rape videos... To make money.
So today, we sued the owners of MindGeek, and we sued the executives.
And if executives like that end up going to jail,
and end up having to pay big judgments,
that will make a big difference.
So our goal is to incentivize the adult industry
to only sell legitimate product.
[interviewer] Is this a moment of reckoning for the online porn industry?
This industry is going to get cleaned up.
[phone rings]
Hello, Mike Bowe.
Hello. Hello.
And did they get taken down, or are they still up there?
We'll call you back within the week.
[music continues]
- [interviewer] Another one? - Yeah. It's a tough one. It's a mother.
You know, this advocate Laila Mickelwait, who was like a one-woman wrecking crew,
it was her and a Twitter feed.
[all] Shut it down!
[Bowe] She just started tweeting stuff out and, you know,
she was this force of nature.
We worked with her a little bit.
We did our own investigation.
And we put together a case.
[music fades out]
[tense music playing]
"Monsanto of porn."
"MindGeek's racketeering enterprise."
"It's just like The Sopranos."
[Stabile] "Appropriately dubbed, 'The Monsanto of Porn,'
MindGeek is a classic criminal enterprise
carried out through wide-ranging criminal activities,
including but not limited to..."
[Perdue] "...human trafficking, child pornography,
criminal copyright piracy..."
[Adora] "...Internet hacking, stalking, and doxing..."
"...blackmail and extortion, mail and wire fraud, embezzlement..."
[Stabile] "...bank and creditor fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering."
"The company's top management
and shadowy international financiers and their investors are the..."
[Perdue] "...'bosses' of this enterprise and, together with their 'capos,'
run its rackets and schemes."
[Bowe] It's a racketeering case.
So if you think about The Sopranos. You know, you have a boss who's in charge,
but he doesn't go out and do the dirty work,
he's just the boss, and he's got capos,
and they got soldiers, and there's just, sort of, other people who...
and the people who do the dirty work really aren't the boss,
but everyone kicks up to the boss.
And so, here you have MindGeek
that has this amalgam of people who work for them,
contract for them, they're performers, or they're writers,
they do work together.
And you're able to prove they do their business
through these racketeering activities, then everybody who's in the enterprise
is equally culpable.
"Over the course of the next year, MindGeek's press relations
and social media organization
would aggressively disseminate gross disinformation."
"This campaign included numerous MindGeek Pornhub models,
including Gwen Adora and its brand ambassador, Asa Akira,
who were instructed via direct messages on Pornhub's website
and provided with talking points to disseminate MindGeek's disinformation."
"In return for participating in this disinformation campaign,
these agents of MindGeek were rewarded with supplemental compensation
and better promotion on the MindGeek platform."
[interviewer] What is this?
Absolute bullshit.
That's-- That is
absolute lies.
All of it.
That is a portion of the racketeering lawsuit against Pornhub.
[interviewer] And... why are you named in it?
[scoffs] Good question.
Um, I was a model who was vocal to the press
and on my own social media
about the misinformation
that the organization who has compiled this is trying to spread.
So I was named,
saying that my information was misinformation.
[retro electronic music playing]
[Adora] I was not hired by Pornhub to defend them.
When I spoke to the media, I was worried that Pornhub
wasn't gonna be h-- happy with that.
Like, I didn't know if they'd be okay with me, like, going off on my own
and, like, saying what I needed to say.
[Stabile] "Social media optimization, SMO,
was also an integral part of its enterprise."
"As part of this SMO, MindGeek used its extensive control and influence
over all aspects of the new online porn industry that it dominated
to mount powerful public messaging campaigns
when it felt it necessary."
"This network included public interest non-for-profits
like the Free Speech Coalition,
which received substantial support from MindGeek
and was called by the industry and MindGeek insiders its 'lobbying arm.'"
MindGeek is a significant contributing member of the Free Speech Coalition,
but prior to the Pornhub article, I'd never spoken to anybody
from MindGeek's communications team. I didn't know who they were.
It's one thing to say, "Oh, we have evidence,"
or "This thing happened, and this is an example of what it meant."
But as far as I can tell, the only existence of these claims
are actually in the lawsuit.
Most of it is hearsay and secondhand information
or something that's not sourced at all.
They're just making endless claims.
[Burgoyne] "The enterprise's paramount focus on secrecy
was reflected in the Bro Club's obsession with suspected snitches."
"This ubiquitous 'Bro Club' term included,
not only those who they suspected of speaking
outside the MindGeek organization,
but also those who spoke up or objected internally."
"Even a suspicion by a single Bro Club member
that an individual was a snitch would not merely block their advancement
but ultimately result in them being pushed out of the company entirely."
"Such individuals would either be frozen out and elect to leave,
be set up to fail in staged assignments,
or simply be told that there was a consensus that they should be let go
without any explanation as to why
or on whose word."
Well, this I can really relate to. Uh... [scoffs]
I got the sense that they smelled a snitch in me.
But I also think that I had--
if I hadn't been treated the way that I had,
that I probably wouldn't be sitting here talking to you.
[ethereal music playing]
Obviously, having non-consensual material
uploaded onto a huge platform is a violence in and of itself,
and I would never say otherwise because that is truly
a horrifying thing on its own.
But these accusations push all these performers,
and even me, like an ex-employee,
to feel like we have to defend it.
Because I know that Pornhub is being used as shorthand for the entire porn industry.
And I-- And I do wanna defend the porn industry
because I know that criticisms
ultimately end up hurting performers the most.
So, when people say,
"Oh, well all these performers are coming to the defense of Pornhub."
It's like, "Of course,"
because people are saying that it's The Sopranos.
Like, what are you-- what are we supposed to say to that?
Of course that's ridiculous.
Miss Mickelwait, I-- I-- um...
S-- Stuff with this committee, new stuff happens every day,
stuff I've never, ever seen before in the history of the committees
that I've been on for many, many years.
We got a letter today from... Let's see, who did we get a letter from?
Feras Antoon and David Tassillo wrote us a letter,
a personal letter about you.
Um, warning us that, uh, well, it's weird,
it's-- it's about you, but then it's about someone named Benjamin Nolot,
uh, who, uh, they say is against legal pornography.
"Mr. Nolot is against same-sex marriage and women's reproductive rights."
Um, anyways...
D'you have anything to say about this letter we received
from the heads of MindGeek?
[Mickelwait] That's standard procedure for them.
You know, the response of MindGeek has been, uh, you know,
really inexcusable.
They have sought to call advocates, who are speaking out about this, "liars."
They've called me personally a liar many times.
That I was intentionally misleading.
Um, you know, they have harassed.
Instead of taking responsibility, what they've done,
you know, for the past year and beyond, is try to attack,
try to quiet, and to silence
those who are telling the truth about their site,
and that is unacceptable.
And you say this is a case of, um, them gaslighting you?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
So Laila Mickelwait was the director of abolition at Exodus Cry.
Abolition in terms of, "I want to abolish the sex trade industry and pornography."
Exodus Cry is an anti-trafficking organization
founded by Benjamin Nolot, an Evangelical preacher.
And its goal is to end sex work entirely.
They make documentaries about the decline of American sexual culture.
[man] Better show your fucking bags! Whoo!
[Perdue] To say that fundamental Christian beliefs
are not at the root of Exodus Cry's mandate
is just not accurate.
[chanting] Shut it down!
[Perdue] And it's also masking where they're coming from
because it's pushing this far-right Christian mandate
under this guise of "liberal, save the women, save the children"
language, and it's been very effective.
[Stabile] NCOSE is another anti-trafficking organization.
It's the latest iteration of Morality in Media,
a faith-based organization that goes back to the early '60s,
when they wanted to remove, you know, smut, broadly defined,
from the public sphere.
Around 2015, they recalibrated,
and they rebranded themselves as
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation,
and what they argued was,
"We are now fighting sex trafficking and exploitation."
[DeVille] "Their new name seems to have been chosen to,
one, borrow legitimacy from the unrelated
but sound-alike National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,
a respected secular organization with no anti-porn agenda."
"And the ploy worked."
"While mentions of morality in the media
often highlight their religious background,
the same organization under the name NCOSE
is now routinely quoted by mainstream journalists
without disclosing their origins, agendas, or extremist views
about what constitutes 'hardcore pornography.'"
And just so the public knows,
Sports Illustrated to them
is hardcore pornography,
along with Cosmopolitan.
[Stabile] NCOSE releases a "Dirty Dozen List" every year,
which is their top offenders for what they call "exploitation."
The problem is that NCOSE believes that all sexual content is exploitation,
and they believe that pornography fuels sex trafficking.
Who is this, like, "they," you know? Uh--
Individuals who, you know, are worried
and who feel like their livelihoods are threatened, I mean, I...
You know, I wish they knew that I actually care about them.
That I think they've been exploited, and that, of course,
I, like, think they're real people, and I don't want them to be hurt.
I have absolutely no hard feelings for them. So the fact that they might
think something about us that isn't true doesn't bother me,
except that I just, you know, I wish they knew the truth.
[Stabile] The interesting thing about NCOSE and Exodus Cry
is that they don't provide exit services.
But if you want people to exit the sex industry,
if you think that pornography is immoral
and exploitative, and you don't think people should do it,
and you think that people are coerced into doing it because they need the money,
well, help them with the money.
The blame really resides on Pornhub.
If MindGeek and Pornhub hadn't completely destroyed
the market for individual creators
to create their own content freely from their control,
then they wouldn't be so dependent on MindGeek.
I can understand why they would be frustrated,
but the reason that they're having to cling to this horrific entity
is because they have made it-- That entity has made it so.
It's made them dependent on them so that they will stick up for them.
[Perdue] General public opinion about pornography,
ultimately does not harm
Pornhub executives' pockets. It just doesn't.
What increasingly negative media around porn hurts
is porn performers, who are very publicly involved in the porn industry.
They can't just leave the office and go home.
They can't just quit their job. Get a different job.
You know, they're very publicly involved in this in a way that,
if you've been doing it for a while, is very difficult to erase fully.
And I've seen many, many, many times
the direct result of this kind of broad strokes criticism
and who it affects, and it's not who it should.
You know, you are quite successful. How much do you make?
I'm sorry. You want me to tell the panel how much I make?
Yeah. What's your-- What's your salary? What's your income last year?
Well, obviously, this is a very private matter
that I would not like to share with the committee. Uh...
Uh, I get paid fairly, like any other CEO of a-- of a-- of a company.
Right. Okay. How much worldwide gross profit
did your company make last year? And how much the year prior?
That's public knowledge.
I-- I don't have exact numbers, but, uh--
You don't know how much your company made last year?
Mr. Dong. Mr. Dong. I know how much our company made.
This is a private company, and I don't understand the relevance
of what a private company makes has to do with...
- D'you file taxes? - [Antoon] Of course we do.
It's been reported-- It's been reported in the 460 million range last year.
Is that-- Is that somewhere close?
Uh, I have to go back and check.
Uh, I find that very interesting
that you consider your financial information
to be private and, uh, confidential,
um, in view of the business that you're in, uh,
but Mr. Antoon, it has been reported that you are building a sprawling mansion
in the north end of Montréal,
that you and your wife own two other large properties in Québec,
including a compound in the Laurentians,
and that you drive a Lamborghini Urus.
Are these assets yours
or are they owned by MindGeek
or one of the related companies?
I don't understand how what I own is relevant to this committee.
And number two, I don't think it's illegal to own a house or a property.
I don't own anything in the Laurentians. If you look at media reports--
I'm asking if it's owned by yourself or by MindGeek? Or by a company?
Depending which property you're talking about, but no,
MindGeek does not own any property.
[sirens wailing]
[anchor] A new home being built by one of the executives
of the company that owns Pornhub has been the target of arson.
[anchor 2] Realtor Joseph Montanaro, who listed the home last week
for almost $20 million, confirmed it is Feras Antoon's mansion.
The house was controversial even before it was built, and now this.
[somber electronic music playing]
[Patriquin] It was spring 2021.
Antoon was building a house.
Sort of in Montréal.
Massive spread. And got into a little bit of trouble
'cause he cut down a bunch of trees he wasn't supposed to.
And then, lo and behold, it caught fire.
There was not much house left at the end of it.
At first, I was like, "It sounds like something from a movie."
It was an enormous fire, like, a raging fire.
I have no idea what kind of person it takes...
[chuckles in disbelief] ...to do something like that.
As far as I know,
there's never been any movement as to who exactly did it.
I'd heard everything from, you know, a couple of kids who happened upon
a really nice house that would look good going up into flames,
to people realizing that he was living there
because it was very public.
And this happened all at the time when MindGeek itself
was, uh, certainly in the headlines for the wrong reasons.
[Stabile] There are lots of people who don't like the adult industry,
and there's lots of good reasons for people to stay out of the spotlight.
A good example is Feras Antoon.
His name was public if you knew where to search, but he wasn't out front.
When his name was exposed, when a member of committee in Parliament
talked about the neighborhood he lived in, you know,
shortly thereafter, the house was burned down.
There's tons of stigma around the adult business.
There's plenty of reasons why you would not use a real name.
- [interviewer] How did you pick your name? - Don't you know anything?
It's my first pet's name and the street I grew up on. [laughing]
So, since, like, Pornhub just lost their payment processing ability,
most of my work is coming from OnlyFans these days.
And everything about my workday
is centered around making sure that that stays as reliable as possible.
And one of the more, like, fun things that I do on OnlyFans
is I offer dick ratings.
I started doing it because I got a ton of requests from guys, like,
"Hey, would you rate my dick?"
And I was like, "Excuse me? You want me to look at your dick and then rate it?"
Aw.
The thing that I sell the most are video dick ratings,
and so this is me just literally filming myself on my phone.
I never look at their actual dick pic
until the moment that I'm filming the rating video.
All right, first wiener of the day.
Hello there! Um, I don't know your real name,
but I hope you're having a good day so far.
I've got your dick pic pulled up in front of me,
and, um, you have a nice-looking dick.
Like, I can't get a great sense of, like, scale from this.
I think it looks like it's about average, maybe slightly smaller than average,
but then, like, probably average girth or maybe even bigger than average girth.
You've got a great dick. It's ample-sized.
It looks like a very nice, well-taken-care-of dick.
I can tell that you've put some effort into your grooming.
It looks very well moisturized. [giggles]
It's, like, reminiscent of a really big banana.
It looks like you have a pretty good-sized dick
from what I can tell here,
and you definitely have, like, super-prominent veins.
It looks like it's a good size,
and I can tell that you are circumcised
and that you have nice balls.
[laughs] And, you know, that's enough for me to feel very confident
in giving you a 7 out of 10,
and I hope that you're happy with that rating.
7.5 out of 10.
So, excellent job.
Your rating is a solid
and quite above average 8 out of 10.
I hope that you are super happy with that rating.
Thank you so much for being a fan, and I hope you have
a great rest of your night, and I'll talk to you soon in my DMs.
[keyboard clattering]
[Souras] Operating a pornography website, like any other social media website,
is almost like operating a firecracker factory
and not banning smoking.
You're creating an explosive situation
for the most vulnerable members of our population.
The bulk of Pornhub's content was probably completely legal,
but they operate on this razor's edge,
and that's where the tremendous danger zone for any adult site is.
So the biggest law out there right now is the Communications Decency Act,
Section 230.
And that really just provides
that if you are an interactive services provider,
you are not responsible in any way for what gets published on your website.
230 has become a complete shield of protection
for really egregious criminal activity
that even when people are being sex trafficked,
sold, horrifically abused online,
these websites just throw up their hands and say,
"Someone else put that on my site. That's not my problem."
Unfortunately, they've been very successful.
But when court after court was denying these claims
on behalf of sex trafficking victims, Congress responded.
They passed FOSTA-SESTA,
which is Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act,
and they said 230 was never intended
to shield those who are knowingly profiting off sex trafficking.
[Stabile] After FOSTA-SESTA, there were lots of platforms that said,
"We don't wanna be responsible for this."
So you saw Craigslist take down its personal ads
and Reddit take down its sex work subreddit.
Because if something was missed, if somebody was trafficked,
if somebody was actually underage,
then suddenly they could be prosecuted, right?
And not just the owner of the platform
but the employees at the platform.
And so, there was a general silencing.
We will not be deleted!
[Stabile] Sex workers in general were deplatformed across the Internet.
[chanting] FOSTA-SESTA kills!
[woman] Sex workers had to go back into situations
that are not necessarily as safe as it was working online.
There's just crazy amounts of numbers that, like,
33% had to go back and face domestic violence
or go back to their pimp and, like, 72% of us lost our income.
Lost a lot of our income.
Had our income jeopardized or censored. Had our accounts shut down.
[tense music playing]
Not only did it make it unsafe,
it made child traffickers harder to find.
That's what that law did. That law's still in place right now.
[Perdue] I was in a Pornhub general meeting,
and the CEO said,
"What's 'SESTA-FOSTA'?"
Which was really obviously infuriating for me,
given that they have made their fortunes off of sex workers
and clearly did not bother to give
one ounce of interest into their well-being.
SESTA-FOSTA really made a dent
on how sex workers were able to market themselves online
and has influenced more censorship
on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
[Dahl] It used to be a lot easier to get new fans via social media,
but after FOSTA-SESTA was passed,
the shadowbanning got so bad that I can't even really reliably
tell my fans that I'm on the Internet via those websites.
I have a couple Instagram accounts. It's very common, I have backup accounts.
But my main account, with the most number of followers, is shadowbanned.
So no one can find me by searching my name.
Like, if you search "Siri Dahl," I don't come up.
You have to know my entire username, type it in as it appears, and hit enter,
and then it will show you my profile.
There's no way for anyone who doesn't already follow me on Instagram
to ever discover my profile.
They must already know that I'm on there and be following me.
And it is totally expected that if I post a photo of me, like, in a bikini
or, like, in a tank top and a skirt,
like, anything that, like, a non sex-worker could post on Instagram
and it would be fine, like, if I post it, it gets flagged as soliciting.
[scoffs] Even if I don't put a caption that says anything on there.
And it's not just social media.
The financial institutions have a really impressive amount of power
over the porn industry, to a degree that most
consumers of porn do not realize.
There's just a whole really long laundry list
of terminology that you cannot use.
And some of it is very sensical.
A lot of it is words that would imply any type of lack of consent.
But a lot of it is very queer phobic. Like "fisting."
"Fisting" is not allowed. I cannot put the word "fisting" on OnlyFans.
"Pegging" is not allowed.
It's just because some executive at Mastercard
has a fear of things in his butt.
[keyboard clicking]
[Perdue] This increased censorship online
means that these models have to rely again on studios,
on bigger platforms like Pornhub, on management
to grow their audience.
If I didn't have the stable income from OnlyFans,
I would be put back in a place where I might have to consider
accepting shoot requests from companies that I haven't worked for before,
that I maybe don't trust, or I question their,
you know, their set environment.
And so, after seeing the fallout of Pornhub
having their payment processing capabilities banned, like...
I think me and just about everyone I know in the industry
immediately was like, "Oh no."
" OnlyFans."
[anchor] OnlyFans is a website, which is basically built on sex,
and models and performers have been able to charge for nude imagery.
Well, now the group says, as of 1st October,
they are phasing out sexually explicit content.
[Stabile] So after Visa and Mastercard
stopped working with Pornhub,
Mastercard came out with new regulations.
And basically it said,
"If you're going to be an adult site that processes with us,
any piece of content that is on your site,
whether you create it or a user uploads it,
needs to have this chain of paperwork."
Which, for the adult industry, was something we already did.
But the regulations that Mastercard put out were quite vague.
[anchor] OnlyFans founder says, "Unfair."
Banks gave him no choice but to ban porn.
Immediately, I went into crisis management mode
because I was like, "I don't know where my money is gonna be coming
from one month from now."
They know that fans of OnlyFans are only fans of one thing, right?
They have tried to model themselves as something other,
but everybody knows OnlyFans is a porn site. Period.
[Stabile] When OnlyFans got shut down, sex workers were prepared.
- [girl] Hello. - Hey, can you hear me?
- [girl] I can. - That's great.
[interview] You know, we had spent months talking with them about Section 230.
We'd spent months talking with them about banking discrimination
and the censorship powers of the credit card companies.
So, when OnlyFans happened, people were ready to speak out.
[DeVille] Even though a massive percentage of their platform
is made up of sex workers and sexual content,
they almost decided that eliminating all of that
would be more profitable than eliminating credit card processing.
I think that if it had played out like it played out with Pornhub,
OnlyFans wouldn't have been able to switch back.
[anchor] OnlyFans doing a total one-eighty,
scrapping plans to ban sexually explicit material.
The decision coming less than a week after its original announcement.
They completely did a one-eighty and said,
"Never mind. We're not banning adult content."
"We've suspended that rule."
Which is like,
"Okay." [laughs] "That's good."
"Uh, that was a big scare. I'm very relieved."
"But also, what the hell?"
[tense music playing]
[Perdue] The direct conflation of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation
with pornography harms everybody involved.
It harms people who are looking to consume porn in a healthy way.
And it opens up the possibility for porn to be non-consensual,
which should not be the case.
[bright electronic music playing]
- [Dahl] Hello! - [Mills] Hey, stranger.
- [chuckles] How are you? - [Dahl] Good.
[Mills] Good to see you. Welcome to the set.
[Perdue] In order for it to be pornography,
it has to be consensual.
Otherwise, it is documentation of sexual abuse, and that's what it is.
There's no such thing as non-consensual sex. It is rape.
There is no such thing as non-consensual pornography.
It is rape.
[squealing] Hi! Hello!
[Perdue] Pornography is pornography
and that has to inherently imply consent...
This is nice.
...100% of the time.
[Mills] Could we take a series that is a hot series
and can we just kind of Trojan horse some important points of influence
into that story so that when people watch it, they think,
"Oh man, I watched this really hot scene."
But the fact that the characters talked about consent beforehand,
could that not be, like, the best form of foreplay?
Is that-- Does that not make the sex so much hotter?
[crew] Welcome back to The Yes List. We are at sequence three. Take nine.
Soft sticks. Marker.
[Mills] Action.
Well, I think first I would like to tell both of you what I'm into.
- [Hudson] Okay. - Let's hear it.
[Dahl] I'm totally fine with spanking or slapping,
but, um, just a little more gentle if it's anywhere other than on my ass.
[Hudson] Sure.
I actually like it if I just get a little bit of, like, a face slap.
If-- If it comes...
to you in the moment, you know.
- [Hudson] I want you to want it. - [Dahl laughs]
[Hudson] So if you want it, we'll give it to you.
- [man] Mm-hmm. - [Dahl] Mm-hmm. Ooh! Mm-hmm. [laughs]
[inhales deeply, exhales] What about you guys?
[man] I love good sensual making out.
Um...
What about you, Wolf? What do you like?
- Mmm. You mind helping her with that? - Keep talking.
- Okay, I got a little distracted there. - I'm just getting hot.
That's okay. Me too.
- [Hudson] I like this outfit. - [Dahl giggles]
Um...
I love kissing. I love touching. I love my neck being played with.
[Dahl] Mm-hmm? Mm!
Um, I don't like to be choked.
I do like to be choked by the way. I forgot to say that earlier.
- You do. - I do.
- [Hudson] Okay. - Mm-hmm.
- But I will not choke... No one chokes Wolf. - No choking. No-- No slapping.
If the attack on porn
continues on the path that it's currently on, it's like...
It's not just an attack on porn, it's an attack on women's sexuality,
it's an attack on queer sexuality,
it's an attack on people being able to express themselves openly,
uh, especially online.
[Dreams] I know it's a dark demon,
our industry, but I don't think it's as dark as they portray it.
And no one that's judging me for what I'm doing for work
was there for me when I had my bad days.
[woman] Oh my God, I'm so excited.
- [Adora laughs] The big moment. - [woman] Yes!
If it wasn't for porn, like, I probably wouldn't be alive.
[Adora] Thank you. Thank you.
- Cheers to Gwen! - [all] To Gwen!
[Adora laughs] Thank you.
I think a lot of people who were calling for the downfall of Pornhub
didn't really realize what that meant.
I think they just wanted the website deleted, and they thought,
"Whoo, check mark. Like, this is great. We did it. We got rid of this material."
[jingle playing]
[Adora] While I do agree that Pornhub did not do a good enough job
of helping those victims,
the illegal content exists on every website.
So if we are saying that all the websites should go down,
like, that's not stopping the videos from happening.
That's not fixing the issues.
That's just gonna keep happening on different websites.
So it's an exhausting fight because, realistically,
those people don't care about the-- the victims.
They just care about getting the porn industry
to be as small as possible. They don't want us thriving.
[presenter] And now, the winners of the 4th annual Pornhub Award.
Top BBW Performer.
- Gwen Adora. - [Adora squealing]
[Pinter] We live our lives every day knowing that we can't do whatever we want.
My free speech and my freedom ends where your nose begins, right?
I can't punch you in the face because I want to,
and we understand that in the physical world.
We need to apply that to the Internet world.
[Souras] There needs to be a carve-out for child sexual abuse material,
the images, and the videos,
the 70,000 a day that we get reported to NCMEC.
But at its root, this is an Internet problem.
The fact that companies can,
with impunity, decide not to regulate content,
can decide not to undertake voluntary measures,
can decide not to take customer complaints about content,
and can simply allow this content to proliferate, right now,
with no legal ability by anybody to seek any change in that.
And that's the Internet. That's not Pornhub.
[Dahl] Can I watch you guys kiss first?
- [man] Want us to kiss first? - [Dahl] Yeah. [giggles]
Fuck! [chuckles]
There are plenty of cultural fields around pornography and sex
that might lead someone to say, "You know what? This isn't my battle."
[performers moaning]
[Stabile] What people don't realize
is porn is traditionally the canary in the coalmine of free speech.
[girl gasps]
And so, anytime there is a crime, anytime a bad actor uses a platform,
it's incumbent on that platform to look and say,
"How can we prevent this in the future? What other things can we do?"
[gasps] Oh my God.
Whoo!
[Stabile] It shouldn't be that we need to shut down all communication
to prevent any crime from ever possibly happening
because that ends a sort of free society.
- [clapboard claps] - [clapboard holder] Bling!
[Mills] And that is officially a cut!
[ethereal electronic music playing]
Well, let's have everybody take a minute.
It's been, you know, it's been a-- it's been a-- a grind,
so let's have some food.
[people chatting]
- [Mills] Yes. - [unheard dialogue]
[Mills] Oh yeah. Absolutely, guys. Thank you.