Suncor will continue to pollute and continue to profit during this “slow transition”
Love thy neighbor or so the teaching goes. Unless you are an oil giant, then you can belch poisonous gas in thy neighborhood and walk away. Offer a string of weak apologies, pay out a $ 9 million settlement, and repeat business as usual.
Suncor, the Canadian- owned oil refinery in Commerce City, has a “good- neighbor” marketing campaign. But residents see right through their public relations persona. The company’s violations keep blowing their cover.
It’s easy when you can see and smell all the operational malfunctions, spills, and toxic spikes. There were 108 malfunctions in the past five years to be exact. The company says that air quality in the neighborhood meets federal workplace standards.
On Dec. 4, a Magellan 6 pipe leaked diesel outside of Suncor. Commerce City tweeted about the road closure near 56th Ave. and Brighton Blvd. But the incident garnered very little news attention.
“Suncor does an amazing job of covering up their spills,” long
Globeville resident Jenny Santos told me in an interview on Monday.
Santos who lives about three miles away from the refinery learned about the spill from a friend. Not the news or Suncor. The lack of communication has made her even more distrustful.
“This government is here to protect corporations, but they call it American interest,” Santos said.
Latinx families like Santos’ are the most affected by the refinery’s non- compliance. This could be a large factor in why regulation enforcement has not been stricter.
Commerce City’s population is 47.4% people of Hispanic or Latinx descent. Almost half are monolingual Spanish- speakers. Elyria- Swansea’s Hispanic/ Latinx population comes at around 84%. And Globeville’s Hispanic/ Latinx population is around 68%.
“My relatives, my neighbors, and I don’t have a voice in the process. We have to continue to endure what decision- makers chose for us,” Santos said.
Globeville, Elyria- Swansea, and Commerce City youth have endured the hidden price. Chiltime dren play outside next to a polluted I- 70 and a non- compliant refinery. Youth in this area have higher emergency room visits for asthma- related treatment.
No matter the health risks or pollution Suncor creates, it remains open. The Colorado De
even if a rape video is removed at the request of the authorities, it may already be too late: The video lives on as it is shared with others or uploaded again and again.
“Pornhub became my trafficker,” a woman named Cali told me. She says she was adopted in the United States from China and then trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in pornographic videos beginning when she was 9. Some videos of her being abused ended up on Pornhub and regularly reappear there, she said.
“I’m still getting sold, even though I’m five years out of that life,” Cali said. Now 23, she is studying in a university and hoping to become a lawyer — but those old videos hang over her.
“I may never be able to get away from this,” she said. “I may be 40 with eight kids, and people are still masturbating to my photos.
“You type ‘ Young Asian,’ and you can probably find me,” she added.
Actually, maybe not. Pornhub recently was offering 26,000 videos in response to that search. That doesn’t count videos that show up under “related searches” that Pornhub suggests, including “young tiny teen,” “extra small petite teen,” “tiny Asian teen” or just “young girl.” Nor does it necessarily count videos on a Pornhub channel called “exploited teen Asia.”
The issue is not pornography but rape. Let’s agree that promoting assaults on children or on anyone without consent is unconscionable. The problem with Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein was not the sex but the lack of consent — and so it is with Pornhub.
I came across many videos on Pornhub that were recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. The rapists would open the eyelids of the victims and touch their eyeballs to show that they were nonresponsive.
Pornhub profited this fall from a video of a naked woman being tortured by a gang of men in China. It is monetizing video compilations with titles like “Screaming Teen,” “Degraded Teen” and “Extreme Choking.”
It should be possible to be sex positive and Pornhub negative.
Pornhub declined to make executives available on the record, but it provided a statement. “Pornhub is unequivocally committed to combating child sexual abuse material, and has instituted a comprehensive, industry- leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate illegal material from our community,” it said. Pornhub added that any assertion that the company allows child videos on the site “is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue.”
II.
At 14, Serena K. Fleites was an A student in Bakersfield, California, who had never made out with a boy. But in the eighth grade she developed a crush on a boy a year older, and he asked her to take a naked video of herself. She sent it to him, and this changed her life.
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’ 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 anymore 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 jobs.
So today Fleites, 19, off drugs for a year but unemployed and traumatized, is living in her car in Bakersfield. 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.”
Concerns about Pornhub are bubbling up. A petition to shut the site down has received 2.1 million signatures. Sen. Ben Sasse, RNeb., 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.” 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.
V.
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.
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.
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.
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: 1.) Allow only verified users to post videos. 2.) Prohibit downloads. 3.) Increase moderation.
These measures wouldn’t kill porn or much bother consumers.
The world has often been oblivious to child sexual abuse, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts. Too late, we prosecute individuals like Jeffrey Epstein or R. Kelly. But we should also stand up to corporations that systematically exploit children. With Pornhub, we have Jeffrey Epstein times 1,000.