The porn mega-site Pornhub has responded to an online petition that called for the site to be shut down, according to a statement by the company posted by The Daily Dot.
The petition on the site Change.org was posted by Laila Mickelwait, who is “Director of Abolition” for the group Exodus Cry, and an anti-porn activist, whose personal site decsribed porn as “misogyny & violence against women,” that is “populated with pimps and predators.”
Her petition claims that “Pornhub is complicit” in the sex trafficking of women, including minors. Mickelwait alleges that PornHub has hosted multiple videos depicting sexual abuse of underage victims.
“It’s time to shut down super-predator site Pornhub and hold the executives behind it accountable,” says the petition, which has accumulated 296,784 signers as of Thursday morning.
The petition is directed at the United States Department of Justice. The Donald Trump-appointed attorney general who leads the DoJ, William Barr, has led anti-porn prosecutions in the 1990s—during his first stint as AG—and is currently being urged by several members of Congress to open a new “War on Porn.”
While Pornhub in the company’s response did not deny the possible presence of illegal content on the massive site, it rejected the claim that it is “complicit” in allowing that content to be published.
The site, the statement said, “has a steadfast commitment to eradicating and fighting any and all illegal content on the internet, including non-consensual content and child sexual abuse material. Any suggestion otherwise is categorically and factually inaccurate.”
The statement said that Pornhub is currently developing “state-of-the-art, comprehensive safeguards on its platform to combat this material.”
Those measures include an “extensive team of human moderators dedicated to manually reviewing all uploads” as well as multiple “digital fingerprinting” software packages that can match uploads to any illegal content previously found on the site.
“Furthermore, Pornhub will continue to work with law enforcement efforts and child protection non-profits in the goal of eliminating any and all illegal content across the internet,” the statement read.
Photo By Pornhub / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
