Pornhubの子供たち

この記事には性的暴行に関する記述が含まれています。

Pornhubは、タイムズスクエアに看板を購入し、ボストンの道路を除雪するために除雪車を提供するウェブサイトで、明るくウインクするいたずらの顔であることを誇りにしている。人種平等のために闘う団体に寄付し、人々がCOVID-19による閉鎖を乗り切れるよう刺激的なコンテンツを無料で提供している。

いわゆる「健全な Pornhub」は、Netflix、Yahoo、Amazonを上回る35 億人の訪問者を毎月集めている。 Pornhub は、1 日あたり約30 億回の広告表示から収益を上げている。あるランキングでは、 Pornhub は世界で 10 番目に訪問者が多いウェブサイトとして挙げられている。

しかし、この会社には別の側面もある。同社のサイトにはレイプ動画があふれているのだ。児童レイプ、リベンジポルノ、シャワーを浴びる女性の盗撮動画、人種差別や女性蔑視のコンテンツ、ビニール袋で窒息死させられる女性の映像などが収益源となっている。「18歳未満の少女」（スペースなし）または「14歳」で検索すると、いずれの場合も10万本以上の動画がヒットする。そのほとんどは児童暴行の動画ではないが、あまりにも多くの動画がヒットする。

フロリダで15歳の少女が行方不明になった後、母親がポルノハブで58本のセックス動画の中から彼女を見つけた。カリフォルニア州の14歳の少女に対する性的暴行がポルノハブに投稿され、同社ではなく動画を見た同級生が当局に通報した。いずれの事件でも、犯人は暴行の罪で逮捕されたが、ポルノハブは動画の共有と利益の獲得の責任を逃れた。

Pornhub は YouTube に似ており、一般の人々が自分のビデオを投稿できる。このサイトに毎年投稿される 680 万本の新しいビデオの大部分は、おそらく同意のある成人に関するものだが、児童虐待や同意のない暴力を描いたものも多数ある。ビデオに映っている若者が 14 歳か 18 歳かを確実に知ることは不可能であるため、Pornhub も他の誰も、どの程度のコンテンツが違法なのか明確に把握していない。

YouTubeとは異なり、Pornhubではこれらの動画をウェブサイトから直接ダウンロードできます。そのため、当局の要請でレイプ動画が削除されたとしても、すでに手遅れかもしれません。動画は他の人に共有されたり、何度もアップロードされたりして、残り続けるのです。

「ポルノハブが私の人身売買業者になった」とカリという女性は私に語った。彼女は中国から米国に養子として送られ、その後養父母によって人身売買され、9歳の頃からポルノビデオに出演させられたという。彼女が虐待されているビデオのいくつかはポルノハブにアップロードされ、定期的に再掲載されていると彼女は語った。

「私は、その生活から5年経った今でも、まだ売られ続けています」とカリさんは言う。現在23歳になった彼女は、大学で勉強しており、弁護士になることを希望しているが、昔のビデオが頭から離れない。

「私はこれからもこの状況から逃れられないかもしれない」と彼女は言う。「私は40歳で子どもが8人いるのに、人々はまだ私の写真を見て自慰行為をしているかもしれない」

「『Young Asian』と入力すれば、おそらく私を見つけられるでしょう」と彼女は付け加えた。

実際のところ、そうではないかもしれない。Pornhub は最近、その検索に応えて 26,000 本の動画を提供していた。これには、Pornhub が提案する「関連検索」の下に表示される「若いちっちゃなティーン」、「極小の小柄なティーン」、「ちっちゃなアジアのティーン」、または単に「若い女の子」などの動画は含まれていない。また、必ずしも「搾取されたティーンアジア」という Pornhub チャンネルの動画も含まれていない。

問題はポルノではなくレイプです。子供や他人への同意のない暴行を奨励するのは不当であることに同意しましょう。ビル・コスビーやハーヴェイ・ワインスタイン、ジェフリー・エプスタインの問題はセックスではなく同意の欠如でした。そしてそれは Pornhub でも同じです。

Pornhub で、意識を失った女性や少女に対する暴行を記録した動画をたくさん見かけました。強姦犯は被害者のまぶたを開き、眼球を触って、反応がないことをアピールしていました。

Pornhub は今年秋、中国で裸の女性が男たちの集団に拷問されている動画で利益を得た。同社は「叫ぶティーン」「屈辱を受けるティーン」「極限の窒息」といったタイトルの動画編集で収益を上げている。窒息している動画を見ると、「彼女は息ができない」という検索も提案されるかもしれない。

セックスには肯定的でありながら、Pornhub には否定的であることも可能であるはずです。

Pornhub は幹部のコメントを公表しなかったが、声明文は出した。「Pornhub は児童性的虐待コンテンツと戦うことに全力で取り組んでおり、コミュニティから違法コンテンツを特定し、根絶するために、業界をリードする総合的な信頼と安全のポリシーを制定しました」と同社は述べた。Pornhub は、同社がサイト上で児童動画を許可しているという主張は「無責任で、まったくの虚偽です」と付け加えた。

II.

セレナ・K・フライツは14歳で、カリフォルニア州ベーカーズフィールドの成績優秀な生徒だったが、男の子と付き合ったことはなかった。しかし、8年生のとき、彼女は1歳年上の男の子に恋をし、その男の子から自分の裸のビデオを撮ってほしいと頼まれた。彼女はそのビデオを彼に送り、これが彼女の人生を変えた。

He asked for another, then another; she was nervous but flattered. “That’s when I started getting strange looks in school,” she remembered. He had shared the videos with other boys, and someone posted them on Pornhub.

Fleites’s world imploded. It’s tough enough to be 14 without having your classmates entertain themselves by looking at you naked, and then mocking you as a slut. “People were texting me, if I didn’t send them a video, they were going to send them to my mom,” she said.

The boy was suspended, but Fleites began skipping class because she couldn’t bear the shame. Her mother persuaded Pornhub to remove the videos, and Fleites switched schools. But rumors reached the new school, and soon the videos were uploaded again to Pornhub and other websites.

Fleites quarreled with her mother and began cutting herself. Then one day she went to the medicine cabinet and took every antidepressant pill she could find.

Three days later, she woke up in the hospital, frustrated to be still alive. Next she hanged herself in the bathroom; her little sister found her, and medics revived her.

As Fleites spiraled downward, a friend introduced her to meth and opioids, and she became addicted to both. She dropped out of school and became homeless.

At 16, she advertised on Craigslist and began selling naked photos and videos of herself. It was a way to make a bit of money, and maybe also a way to punish herself. She thought, “I’m not worth anything any more because everybody has already seen my body,” she told me.

Those videos also ended up on Pornhub. Fleites would ask that they be removed. They usually would be, she says — but then would be uploaded again. One naked video of her at 14 had 400,000 views, she says, leaving her afraid to apply for fast-food jobs for fear that someone would recognize her.

So today Fleites, 19, off drugs for a year but unemployed and traumatized, is living in her car in Bakersfield, along with three dogs that have proved more loyal and loving than the human species. She dreams of becoming a vet technician but isn’t sure how to get there. “It’s kind of hard to go to school when you’re living in a car with dogs,” she said.

“I was dumb,” she acknowledged, noting that she had never imagined that the videos could be shared online. “It was one small thing that a teenager does, and it’s crazy how it turns into something so much bigger.

“A whole life can be changed because of one little mistake.”

III.

The problem goes far beyond one company. Indeed, a rival of Pornhub, XVideos, which arguably has even fewer scruples, may attract more visitors. Depictions of child abuse also appear on mainstream sites like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook. And Google supports the business models of companies that thrive on child molestation.

Google returns 920 million videos on a search for “young porn.” Top hits include a video of a naked “very young teen” engaging in sex acts on XVideo along with a video on Pornhub whose title is unprintable here.

I asked the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to compile the number of images, videos and other content related to child sexual exploitation reported to it each year. In 2015, it received reports of 6.5 million videos or other files; in 2017, 20.6 million; and in 2019, 69.2 million.

Facebook removed 12.4 million images related to child exploitation in a three-month period this year. Twitter closed 264,000 accounts in six months last year for engaging in sexual exploitation of children. By contrast, Pornhub notes that the Internet Watch Foundation, an England-based nonprofit that combats child sexual abuse imagery, reported only 118 instances of child sexual abuse imagery on its site over almost three years, seemingly a negligible figure. “Eliminating illegal content is an ongoing battle for every modern content platform, and we are committed to remaining at the forefront,” Pornhub said in its statement.

The Internet Watch Foundation couldn’t explain why its figure for Pornhub is so low. Perhaps it’s because people on Pornhub are inured to the material and unlikely to report it. But if you know what to look for, it’s possible to find hundreds of apparent child sexual abuse videos on Pornhub in 30 minutes. Pornhub has recently offered playlists with names including “less than 18,” “the best collection of young boys” and “under- - age.”

Congress and successive presidents have done almost nothing as this problem has grown. The tech world that made it possible has been mostly passive, in a defensive crouch. But pioneering reporting in 2019 by my Times colleagues has prodded Congress to begin debating competing strategies to address child exploitation.

Concerns about Pornhub are bubbling up. A petition to shut the site down has received 2.1 million signatures. Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, called on the Justice Department to investigate Pornhub. PayPal cut off services for the company, and credit card companies have been asked to do the same. An organization called Traffickinghub, led by an activist named Laila Mickelwait, documents abuses and calls for the site to be shut down. Twenty members of Canada’s Parliament have called on their government to crack down on Pornhub, which is effectively based in Montreal.

“They made money off my pain and suffering,” an 18-year-old woman named Taylor told me. A boyfriend secretly made a video of her performing a sex act when she was 14, and it ended up on Pornhub, the police confirmed. “I went to school the next day and everybody was looking at their phones and me as I walked down the hall,” she added, weeping as she spoke. “They were laughing.”

Taylor said she has twice attempted suicide because of the humiliation and trauma. Like others quoted here, she agreed to tell her story and help document it because she thought it might help other girls avoid suffering as she did.

IV.

Pornhub is owned by Mindgeek, a private pornography conglomerate with more than 100 websites, production companies and brands. Its sites include Redtube, Youporn, XTube, SpankWire, ExtremeTube, Men.com, My Dirty Hobby, Thumbzilla, PornMD, Brazzers and GayTube. There are other major players in porn outside the Mindgeek umbrella, most notably XHamster and XVideos, but Mindgeek is a porn titan. If it operated in another industry, the Justice Department could be discussing an antitrust case against it.

Pornhub and Mindgeek also stand out because of their influence. One study this year by a digital marketing company concluded that Pornhub was the technology company with the third greatest-impact on society in the 21st century, after Facebook and Google but ahead of Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.

Nominally based in Luxembourg for tax reasons, Mindgeek is a private company run from Montreal. It does not disclose who owns it, but it is led by Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, both Canadians, who declined to be interviewed.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada calls himself a feminist and has been proud of his government’s efforts to empower women worldwide. So a question for Trudeau and all Canadians: Why does Canada host a company that inflicts rape videos on the world?

Mindgeek’s moderators are charged with filtering out videos of children, but its business model profits from sex videos starring young people.

“The goal for a content moderator is to let as much content as possible go through,” a former Mindgeek employee told me. He said he believed that the top executives weren’t evil but were focused above all on maximizing revenue.

While Pornhub would not tell me how many moderators it employs, I interviewed one who said that there are about 80 worldwide who work on Mindgeek sites (by comparison, Facebook told me it has 15,000 moderators). With 1.36 million new hours of video uploaded a year to Pornhub, that means that each moderator would have to review hundreds of hours of content each week.

The moderators fast forward through videos, but it’s often difficult to assess whether a person is 14 or 18, or whether torture is real or fake. Most of the underage content involves teenagers, the moderator I spoke with said, but some comes from spy cams in toilets or changing rooms and shows children only 8 to 12.

“The job in itself is soul-destroying,” the moderator said.

Pornhub appears to be increasingly alarmed about civil or criminal liability. Lawyers are circling, and nine women sued the company in federal court after spy cam videos surfaced on Pornhub. The videos were shot in a locker room at Limestone College in South Carolina and showed women showering and changing clothes.

Executives of Pornhub appear in the past to have assumed that they enjoyed immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet platforms on which members of the public post content. But in 2018 Congress limited Section 230 so that it may not be enough to shield the company, leading Mindgeek to behave better.

It has doubled the number of moderators in the last couple of years, the moderator told me, and this year Pornhub began voluntarily reporting illegal material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. After previously dragging its feet in removing videos of children and nonconsensual content, Pornhub now is responding more rapidly.

It has also compiled a list of banned content. I obtained a copy of this list, and it purports to bar videos with terms or themes like “rape,” “preteen,” “pedophilia” and “bestiality” (it helpfully clarifies that this “includes eels, fish, octopus, insects”). Diapers are OK “if no scatophilia.” Mutilation depends on context but “cannot depict severing parts of the body.”

So while it is now no longer possible to search on Pornhub in English using terms like “underage” or “rape,” the company hasn’t tried hard to eliminate such videos. A member called “13yoboyteen” is allowed to post videos. A search for “r*pe,” turns up 1,901 videos. “Girl with braces” turns up 1,913 videos and suggests also trying “exxxtra small teens.” A search for “13yo” generates 155,000 videos. To be clear, most aren’t of 13-year-olds, but the fact that they’re promoted with that language seems to reflect an effort to attract pedophiles.

Moreover, some videos seem at odds with the list of banned content. “Runaway Girl Gets Ultimatum, Anal or the Streets” is the title of one Pornhub video. Another user posts videos documenting sex with teenage girls as they weep, protest and cry out in pain.

While Pornhub is becoming more careful about videos of potentially litigious Americans, it remains cavalier about overseas victims. One Indonesian video is titled “Junior High School Girl After Class” and shows what appears to be a young teenager having sex. A Chinese sex video, just taken down, was labeled: “Beautiful High School Girl Is Tricked by Classmates and Taken to the Top of a Building Where She Is Insulted and Raped.”

“They’re making money off the worst moment in my life, off my body,” a Colombian teenager who asked to be called Xela, a nickname, told me. Two American men paid her when she was 16 for a sexual encounter that they filmed and then posted on Pornhub. She was one of several Pornhub survivors who told me they had thought of or attempted suicide.

In the last few days as I was completing this article, two new videos of prepubescent girls being assaulted were posted, along with a sex video of a 15-year-old girl who was suicidal after it went online. I don’t see how good-faith moderators could approve any of these videos.

V.

“It’s always going to be online,” Nicole, a British woman who has had naked videos of herself posted and reposted on Pornhub, told me. “That’s my big fear of having kids, them seeing this.”

That’s a recurring theme among survivors: An assault eventually ends, but Pornhub renders the suffering interminable.

Naked videos of Nicole at 15 were posted on Pornhub. Now 19, she has been trying for two years to get them removed.

“Why do videos of me from when I was 15 years old and blackmailed, which is child porn, continuously [get] uploaded?” Nicole protested plaintively to Pornhub last year, in a message. “You really need a better system. … I tried to kill myself multiple times after finding myself reuploaded on your website.”

Nicole’s lawyer, Dani Pinter, says there are still at least three naked videos of Nicole at age 15 or 16 on Pornhub that they are trying to get removed.

“It’s never going to end,” Nicole said. “They’re getting so much money from our trauma.”

Pornhub has introduced software that supposedly can “fingerprint” rape videos and prevent them from being uploaded again. But Vice showed how this technology is easily circumvented on Pornhub.

One Pornhub scandal involved the Girls Do Porn production company, which recruited young women for clothed modeling gigs and then pushed them to perform in sex videos, claiming that the videos would be sold only as DVDs in other countries and would never go online. Reassured that no one would ever know, some of the women agreed — and then were shattered when the footage was aggressively marketed on Pornhub.

Girls Do Porn was prosecuted for sex trafficking and shut down. But those videos continue to surface and resurface on Pornhub; last time I checked, videos of six victims of Girls Do Porn were on Pornhub, which continues to profit from them.

One of the Girls Do Porn women I saw on Pornhub is now dead. She was murdered at 20, allegedly by an angry ex-boyfriend who is about to go on trial. I’m not disclosing her name because she should be remembered as a vibrant college athlete, and not for a sex video that represented her most mortifying moment.

VI.

So what’s the solution?

I had expected the survivors to want to shut down Pornhub and send its executives to prison. Some did, but others were more nuanced. Lydia, now 20, was trafficked as a child and had many rape videos posted on the site. “My stomach hurts all the time” from the tension, she told me, but she doesn’t want to come across as hostile to porn itself.

“I don’t want people to hear ‘No porn!’” Lydia told me. “It’s more like, ‘Stop hurting kids.’”

Susan Padron told me that she had assumed that pornography was consensual, until a boyfriend filmed her in a sex act when she was 15 and posted it on Pornhub. She has struggled since and believes that only people who have confirmed their identities should be allowed to post videos.

Jessica Shumway, who was trafficked and had a customer post a sex video on Pornhub, agrees: “They need to figure out who’s underage in the videos and that there’s consent from everybody in it.”

I asked Leo, 18, who had videos of himself posted on Pornhub when he was 14, what he suggested.

“That’s tough,” he said. “My solution would be to leave porn to professional production companies,” because they require proof of age and consent.

Right now, those companies can’t compete with mostly free sites like Pornhub and XVideos.

“Pornhub has already destroyed the business model for pay sites,” said Stoya, an adult film actress and writer. She, too, thinks all platforms — from YouTube to Pornhub — should require proof of consent to upload videos of private individuals.

Columnists are supposed to offer answers, but I struggle with solutions. If Pornhub curated videos more rigorously, the most offensive material might just move to the dark web or to websites in less regulated countries. Yet at least they would then not be normalized on a mainstream site.

More pressure and less impunity would help. We’re already seeing that limiting Section 230 immunity leads to better self-policing.

And call me a prude, but I don’t see why search engines, banks or credit card companies should bolster a company that monetizes sexual assaults on children or unconscious women. If PayPal can suspend cooperation with Pornhub, so can American Express, Mastercard and Visa.

明確な解決策は見当たりません。しかし、企業がより良い行動を取るよう動機づけられるように免責を制限すること以外に、役立つと思われる 3 つの手順があります。1) 認証済みユーザーのみに動画の投稿を許可する。2) ダウンロードを禁止する。3) モデレーションを強化する。

これらの対策はポルノを消滅させたり、ポルノの消費者を困惑させたりはしない。YouTubeはダウンロードなしでも繁栄している。Pornhubと取引のある有名ポルノスターのシリ・ダールは、私の3つの提案は「非常に合理的」だと語った。

カトリック教会からボーイスカウトに至るまで、世界はしばしば児童性的虐待に無関心だった。ジェフリー・エプスタインやR・ケリーのような個人を起訴するのは遅すぎた。しかし、組織的に児童を搾取する企業にも立ち向かうべきだ。ポルノハブはジェフリー・エプスタインの1000倍だ。

自殺を考えている方は、National Suicide Prevention Lifeline（1-800-273-8255（TALK））までお電話ください。SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources で、追加のリソースの一覧をご覧いただけます。

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ホリデーギフトの最新情報: 2 週間前に私が毎年恒例のホリデーギフトガイドコラムで紹介した 3 つの団体に 420 万ドル以上を寄付してくださった読者の皆様に深く感謝いたします。非営利団体の 1 つはサハラ以南のアフリカで少女を学校に通わせています。もう 1 つは低所得のアメリカの学生が高校を卒業して大学に入学できるよう支援しています。3 つ目はアジアとアフリカの白内障患者の視力回復を支援しています。詳細についてはKristofImpact.orgをご覧ください。

タイムズは、編集者への多様な投書を掲載することに尽力しています。この記事や他の記事について、皆様のご意見をお聞かせください。ヒントをいくつかご紹介します。メール アドレスはletters@nytimes.comです。