(This petition has migrated to www.traffickinghubpetition.com where over 2.2 million people have signed from 192 countries.)
As featured in the NY Times' "Children of Pornhub"
Sign and share the petition today to SHUT DOWN PORNHUB AND HOLD ITS EXECUTIVES ACCOUNTABLE for enabling, distributing, and profiting from the child abuse, rape, sex trafficking, and criminal image-based abuse of countless victims worldwide.
You can stay up to date on the progress of the petition by following #Traffickinghub founder Laila Mickelwait on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
Media inquiries can be directed to lailamickelwait@traffickinghub.com If you have been victimized on Pornhub or any MindGeek owned website and want help, click here.
#Traffickinghub is a decentralized global movement of individuals, survivors, organizations, and advocates from across a broad spectrum of political, faith and non-faith, economic, and ideological backgrounds, all uniting together for the single purpose of shutting down Pornhub and holding its executives accountable for enabling, distributing and profiting from rape, child abuse, sex trafficking and criminal image-based sexual abuse. The movement was founded in February, 2020 by anti-trafficking activist Laila Mickelwait.
Over 600 organizations, hundreds of survivors, and millions of individuals from 192 countries have joined forces through #Traffickinghub to call for criminal and civil accountability for Pornhub and its parent company MindGeek. In a relatively short amount of time, the #Traffickinghub movement has made enormous progress thanks to the work and participation of all involved.
At the beginning of 2020, with 130 million daily visits, Pornhub was the largest and most popular porn website in the world, the 10th most visited website across the Internet (more than Netflix, Amazon, or Yahoo), and the third most influential tech company on society only surpassed by Facebook and Google. They were making hundreds of millions of dollars annually, primarily by selling 4.6 billion ad impressions daily on millions of videos live on the site at any given time.
By the end of 2022, thousands of media articles had been written exposing Pornhub’s involvement in monetizing sexual crime, Pornhub had taken down 80% of the entire site, totaling 10 million videos, and MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and PayPal had all cut ties with the site. Grant Thornton, Comcast-Xfinity, Roku, Heinz-Unilever joined the credit card giants in shutting down their business relationships with Pornhub and all major mainstream advertisers pulled their ads. TikTok and YouTube removed Pornhub’s accounts and Meta/Instagram permanently shut down Pornhub’s 13 million follower account. 194 victims sued Pornhub/MindGeek in 8 major individual and class action lawsuits across the United States and Canada. Lawsuit damages could potentially reach billions of dollars.
Laila Mickelwait continues to lead the #Traffickinghub movement today and is determined to keep the petition open and to keep fighting for justice until the goals of the movement are accomplished.
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ORIGINAL PETITION TEXT
February, 2020
In recent news there have been numerous shocking cases of sex trafficking and child rape films that were hosted on Pornhub. A 15-year-old girl who had been missing for a year was finally found after her mother was tipped off that her daughter was being featured in videos on the site — 58 such videos of her rape and sexual abuse were discovered on Pornhub.
Her trafficker, who was seen in the videos raping the child, was identified using surveillance footage of him at a 7-Eleven where he was spotted with his victim. He is now facing a felony charge.
Also in recent news was the case of 22 women who were deceived and coerced by Michael Pratt, owner of GirlsDoPorn, into performing sex acts on film that were subsequently uploaded to Pornhub. These women sued GirlsDoPorn and won a $12.7 million lawsuit against the company. According to a federal indictment, Pratt and his co-conspirators produced filmed child rape and sexual abuse content and trafficked a minor. Pratt reportedly fled the United States for New Zealand and is currently wanted on a federal warrant.
But there are other individuals who should also be wanted by law enforcement — CEO Feras Antoon and COO David Tassillo of Mindgeek, the company that owns Pornhub.
You see, Pornhub is complicit in the trafficking of these women and minors and probably thousands more like them.
Pornhub is generating millions in advertising and membership revenue with 42 billion visits and 6 million videos uploaded per year. Yet it has no system in place to verify reliably the age or consent of those featured in the pornographic content it hosts and profits from.
In fact, all that is needed to upload pornography onto Pornhub is an email address. No government-issued ID is required, not even to become “verified” with its trusty blue checkmark that makes everything seem a-OK.
I know this, because I tried it.
It took me under 10 minutes to create a user account and upload blank test content to the site, which went live instantly. I could have then gone on to become Pornhub-verified, and all I would need to do is send a photo of myself holding a paper with my username. That’s it.
It is no surprise that Pornhub admitted to verifying the trafficked 15-year-old girl who was sexually abused in 58 videos on its site. The official Twitter account for Pornhub wrote in response to the breaking story that the 15-year-old girl had been a verified member. After quickly realizing it had just admitted to assisting in her being trafficked, the account deleted the tweets, but the evidence of the admission was cached and still exists.
One of the most-searched terms on Pornhub is “teen” pornography, in fact it has been a top search term on the site for years. The search will result in videos that are constantly being added faster than any individual could watch them. Many feature girls who look 13 years old at best — girls with braces, pigtails, flat chests, no makeup, extremely young faces, holding teddy bears and licking lollipops, all while being aggressively penetrated. A quick search for the word “teen” turns up titles such as “Young Girl Tricked,” “Innocent Brace Faced Tiny Teen F---ed,” “Tiny Petite Thai Teen,” “Teen Little Girl First Time,” on and on ad infinitum.
Pornhub has no reliable system in place to verify that those in the videos it hosts are not trafficked children being raped on film in order to line the pockets of its executives.
What all of this means is that at this very moment, there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of videos of underage sex trafficking victims on Pornhub. We already have evidence, and it is just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s time to shut down super-predator site Pornhub and hold the executives behind it accountable.
