Poor “sex workers” are the real victims of pornography-giant Pornhub’s forced decision to delete 10 million videos of pornography, rape, abuse, and private sex, according to an article posted by the progressive editors at Salon.com.
Under the headline, “The anti-porn religious lobby just destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of pornographers,” Salon’s author claimed:
Pornhub’s new policy and the ricochet it caused did far more harm to content producers than it did to sex traffickers or pedophiles. The purge caused irrevocable damage to pornographers, and compounds the precarity they and other sex workers have faced under the pandemic.
Minorities are hit hardest by Pornhub’s decision to remove 10 million videos, says Salon’s author:
Indeed, Pornhub’s new policies will have the most devastating effects on marginalized pornographers. People of color and trans performers, for example, have found spaces for individual entrepreneurship online, in an industry that historically would rarely hire them. We must recognize that Pornhub’s censorship and the move to restrict payment processing for all sex workers will have the most devastating effects on the most marginalized.
The article blamed the “anti-porn religious lobby” for Pornhub’s shutdown, even though a broad variety of people are denouncing Pornhub for allegedly posting other people’s videos of young girls getting raped, for funding the video-prostitution industry, encouraging sexual trafficking of poor women, endorsing violence in consensual sex, allowing ex-boyfriends to post revenge videos of once-private sexual activity, marketing videos as “racist” and portraying women as tools for men to use.
But the Salon article does highlight one expanding danger — the growing willingness of woke bank executives to blacklist businesses they do not like in the Internet-enabled economy.
Breitbart has shown how established companies and woke executives use their financial blacklisting power to threaten news sites, mainstream artists, non-government detention centers for illegal migrants, and activists for gun rights.
Salon argues:
As a Pornhub user put it, “The internet is becoming more and more sanitized every day because of people taking extreme measures to make us ‘safer.’ It’s censorship masquerading as public safety.”
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“What bothers me is that Visa and Mastercard are major card companies that have now pulled back from allowing sex workers to make a living because of this one company’s giant misstep,” Akynos told me. “It won’t just be Pornhub that they aren’t messing with, it will be everyone else.”
Pornhub’s mid-December partial shutdown was prompted December 4 when the New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof reported that Pornhub “is infested with rape videos.” He continued:
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.
The Salon article claimed that “0.0008 percent of videos on Pornhub featured sexual abuse.”
Amid the claimed evidence of harm to women, girls, men, boys, and to public expectations for sexual relationships, Salon’s author says the real victims of the shutdown are people who lose their income earned from posting legal pornographic videos:
They should have said: Under pressure from the porn abolitionist movement that operates under the guise of thwarting sex trafficking, we are going to compromise the economic lives of hundreds of thousands of performers—during a pandemic, no less. I respect and commend those writing and speaking for people who have been trafficked and teenagers whose abusers post revenge porn on Pornhub or other sites. However, who is speaking for the hundreds of thousands of pornographers whose economic livelihoods have been served upon an altar for penance?