LOS ANGELES—The latest column from controversial New York Times opinion contributor Nicholas Kristof is a proverbial victory lap for his ability to spark moral panic that is targeted at a single adult entertainment platform.
Published last weekend, Kristof's newest column on the subject is titled "These Internal Documents Show Why We Shouldn’t Trust Porn Companies" (which, by the by, is a revised headline that was slapped onto the piece shortly after it went up with the original grenade-thrower "What People at Pornhub Were Thinking When It Shared Videos of Child Rape").
The lone company Kristof apparently regards as singlehandedly responsible for the actions of all is Pornhub parent Aylo. Pornhub was the focus of his similarly controversial and one-sided investigative commentary published by the Times opinion pages in Dec. 2020, titled "The Children of Pornhub."
In the new column, Kristof seized upon a filing error made by a court clerk in a federal district court in Alabama. The filing error made available a tranche of thousands of internal documents and communications between MindGeek (Aylo's previous branding) employees dating back from 2020 or even earlier than that.
A spokesperson for Aylo confirmed the filing error in an email to AVN. The spokesperson referred to the release of these documents as "erroneously unsealed." This didn't stop Kristof, though. He cited exchanges between former employees that are over four years old, joking about child sexual abuse material (CSAM) allegedly available on Pornhub at the time.
“I hope I never get in trouble for having those vids on my computer LOOOOL,” the column quotes one employee as messaging in a private chat.
Other members of the company were concerned, at the time, noting, "There is A LOT of very, very obvious and disturbing CSAM here.”
Another internal document claims that as early as May 2020, Pornhub moderators were aware of 706,000 videos available on the website at the time that were flagged for unlawful content. This was due, Kristof notes, to Pornhub at the time requiring at least 16 flags on a video for it to be removed.
Clearly, this is troubling. But the key issue with much of Kristof's reporting on this matter is his lack of substantive reference to trust and safety overhauls taken since 2020, especially under the new ownership regime at private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners.
"Pornhub executives and owners told me they couldn’t comment on the discovery documents, which I was able to see on a court website, or anything related to current litigation," Kristof wrote. "But they emphasized that the company has tightened its policies since the period covered by the documents, and they argued that it is now working hard to keep nonconsensual material off the site.
"And in fairness, it does seem that there has been significant improvement," Kristof conceded. But he glosses over the depth of improvements.
For example, Aylo works with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) on its TakeItDown program.
The company has endorsed age verification procedures in a manner that actually supports privacy rights for users and has worked with the Internet Watch Foundation in the United Kingdom to craft a code of conduct focused on the adult entertainment industry.
Additionally, Kristof glosses over Aylo's involvement in the StopNCII.org program to counter non-consensual intimate imagery and other sexual abuse imagery.
"We have instituted some of the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history in order to mitigate the ability of bad actors to abuse our platform and post unwanted material," an Aylo spokesperson explained. "Aylo's safety and security measures have set a standard for compliance programs in the tech and social media industries, and credible third-party analyses have commended the success of our efforts to date."
Kristof says he spoke to Solomon Friedman, vice president for compliance at Ethical Capital Partners and a criminal defense attorney. AVN reached out to Friedman and received the same response Kristof quotes, but that response additionally notes how Aylo has disabled searches for tens of thousands of words and phrases in multiple languages.
Aylo's spokesperson says this ranges from 40,000 to 60,000 terms, which also include banned emoji combinations.
Krisof attempts to test this by referencing the terms in the released documents, but the vast majority of the search terms he references are currently blocked. For example, AVN replicated a term search and found several to be blocked, and the results were replaced with prevention messages about CSAM and image-based sexual abuse.
Further, Kristof takes issue with search terms like "abused by daddy," which were found in the documents.
Out of legal caution, Pornhub has decided to cut other terms that fetishize certain proclivities that may not necessarily be illegal but could be construed as problematic for audiences and performers alike. But terms like "young" remain, and rightfully so because the vast majority of material found on Aylo's platforms since it deleted millions of images and videos in 2020 are verified in some capacity.
Just because "young" or "teen" are used to describe a performer who looks "young" or like a "teen" doesn't mean the content is illegal. Pornography is protected under the First Amendment, also meaning that young-appearing adult performers who play a fictional role aren't violating federal child pornography statutes. And, ages for performers are also required by federal law to be confirmed and retained by a custodian of records.
It is also worth noting that Kristof glosses over NCMEC CyberTipline reporting done by Aylo's properties and adult platforms in general.
