The children of Pornhub
The website is infested with rape videos and revenge pornography
NOTE: This article contains descriptions of sexual assault. Following the publication of this column in the New York Times, Pornhub announced many of the changes proposed by Kristof in this column. The company said were a result of an internal report. Kristof wrote on Twitter: “A special thank you to those young women and men who shared their stories ... it was their courage, their stories, that made this happen.”
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 3 billion ad impressions a day. One ranking lists Pornhub as the 10th most visited website in the world.
Yet there’s another side of the company: Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18”
( no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.
After a 15- year- old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on Pornhub — in 58 sex videos. Sexual assaults on a 14- year- old California girl were posted on Pornhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos. In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.
Pornhub is like YouTube in that it allows members of the public to post their own videos. A great majority of the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each year probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and nonconsensual violence. Because it’s impossible to be sure whether a youth in a video is 14 or 18, neither Pornhub nor anyone else has a clear idea of how much content is illegal.
Unlike YouTube, Pornhub allows these videos to be downloaded directly from its website. So
Nicholas Kristof has been a columnist for The New York Times since 2001. He grew up on a farm in Oregon, graduated from Harvard, studied law at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and then studied Arabic in Cairo. He was a longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times and speaks various languages.
partment of Public Health and Environment favors its gradual transition. But the transition to what, who or where is still unclear.
It is clear that federal, state and city officials are having a hard time pulling the plug. Suncor has made itself an indispensable provider in the state.
They’re the largest supplier of road asphalt. They provide about a third of the fuel supply to the Denver International Airport. They also pay for a couple of clean- up efforts. And they pay about $ 14 million in local taxes. For context, Suncor’s CEO Mark Little made $ 10.5 million in 2018 according to the nonprofit website Morningstar.
Still, Suncor’s overdue permit renewals are under review for the next few months. Both Suncor and CDPHE officials will hold a 30- day public comment process. Allegedly this will help inform their decision whether to renew the permits or not.
“As an Indigenous woman living in America, I do not trust a public hearing process,” Santos said. “Are they just going to hear my voice or will they put in place my community’s recommendations?” She wonders what the outreach and feedback process will be like during this pandemic, especially for residents who are monolingual Spanish- speaking residents or who aren’t tech- savvy.
Even if Suncor was to shutter, residents will contend with the fallout. Costly cleanup efforts and medical bills will likely fall back on residents and taxpayers.
For Santos and other residents, the solution is practical. Protect the land, improve our health, and honor our human dignity. But even this Indigenous value, Suncor is capitalizing on.
They invest in the communities they poison. A tried and true corporate public relations tactic. Their strategic funding priorities center on Indigenous peoples, community resilience, and energy future. Perfect language to place Suncor as an active player in Colorado’s future of energy.
“Suncor is committed to being a part of the transition to a low carbon future even as energy demand continues to grow,” company spokeswoman Mita Adesanya said in a statement.
This is the gradual transition city officials speak of and Suncor executives envision. If we’re not vigilant we will fall for the goodneighborunder- strict- regulations once again.
“We come from a colonized experience where we’re taught to blindly trust our local officials. Those who we’ve elected to represent the peoples’ best interest,” Santos said. “Even when their decisions show they are solely profit- based.”
Fast forward 70 years from now: Suncor or another transformed oil and gas company will be Colorado’s green giant saviors. The ones who capitalized on the gradual transition period afforded to them.
The shady neighbors who profited by solving the problem they created. The neighbors who poison our air, land, water and neighborhood in the first place.