Trailer (00:01):
This might be the biggest scandal you haven’t heard about. The largest porn website attracting 130 million users a day more than Netflix or Amazon.

(00:12):
PornHub is under investigation.

(00:15):
This is a company that did whatever it wanted until one woman and a laptop expose the truth. She’s the founder of the Justice Defense Fund, one of the pioneers in anti-trafficking, Laila Mickelwait. Thank you for having me. I was reading the story of a missing 15-year-old girl who was found when somebody tipped off her mother, that she was in 58 videos on porn hub being raped and abused. The Sunday Times did an investigation. They found dozens of illegal videos, even children as young as three years old. How was this happening? I decided to test this upload system and under 10 minutes with only an email address, I was able to upload content that went live on the site. They weren’t asking for an id, they weren’t asking for a consent form to make sure that this wasn’t a rape or trafficking victim. The site became infested with videos of real sexual crime. I have to sound the alarm on this. I was posting on Twitter, started a petition. We’re just about to hit 1 million, 2 million signatures. Hundreds of organizations participating media started to pay attention.

(01:22):
In your article, you write with porn Har. We have Jeffrey Epstein Times of a Thousand. This isn’t about porn. This is about rape and sexual abuse of children. The 12-year-old boy, he was drugged, overpowered, and raped in 23 videos being sold on PornHub. Victims were speaking out left and right. This is going to haunt me for the rest of my life. Whistleblowers were saying this is true. Porn Hub put profits over people. Even the former owner of PornHub reached out saying he wanted to help. Dozens of lawsuits were filed. We went after Visa and MasterCard to cut ties, but they were still resistant. HOH Hub started attacking myself, victim. They don’t want to stop because they’re making a lot of money and they fight. Dirty. Hoh Hub was so scared. They deleted 80% of their site. 10 million videos gone.

(02:14):
Victims, they were so happy and relieved because for the first time in years, their rape videos were off of PornHub.

(02:25):
But the fight’s not over. They are gonna answer for what they’ve done.

Intro (02:46):
This episode is part one of our two part interview with Laila Mickelwait, author of Take Down Inside The Fight to Shut Down PornHub for Child Abuse, rape and Sex Trafficking, Founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, and the founder of the Traffickinghub Movement. In this first part of her interview, Laila discusses her book, which details her journey into investigating the exploitation and non-consensual content on PornHub. She shares how she discovered the extent of the problem and the lack of content moderation on the platform motivated to take action. Laila launched the hashtag trafficking hub on Twitter, wrote an op-Ed, and started a petition to shut down PornHub, which quickly went viral. Join us as we hear from Laila about her important work to decrease exploitation. We hope you enjoy this episode of Consider Before Consuming.

Fight The New Drug (03:40):
Well, Laila, thank you so much for being here with us today. I’m so excited to talk with our listeners or talk with you today and our listeners to hear about your new book that just came out called Take Down Inside the Fight to Shut Down PornHub for Child Abuse, rape and Sex Trafficking. So our listeners just heard the trailer for that. I just wanna say I’ve been part of this movement and seen a lot of this work in real time. Obviously haven’t lived these experiences in the same way that you have, and to be able to see your perspective in the way you’ve detailed things in this book is so compelling and and so important. And so I really encourage all of our listeners to be sure to check out your book. We’ll have a link for it in the show notes. And I’m excited for everyone to hear a little bit about you and your experiences and what we can all do to help support you. So if we can just start, tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got into this work in the first place.

Laila Mickelwait (04:38):
Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for having me on. It’s such an honor and I appreciate all the work that you and your organization does in this space. Yeah. So I have been involved in the anti-sex trafficking fight since 2006 is when I first became aware and got activated and started researching and trying to learn and, you know, pursue education in that direction and internships and finally actually being able to work in the field. So it’s been a while and around, let’s say a little over 10 years ago was when I first became aware that sex trafficking wasn’t just happening offline in brothels and street corners and things like that, but it was being filmed and in a digital world being uploaded online and monetized and distributed. So I really began to focus on understanding that intersection between sex trafficking and online pornography.

(05:33):
Well, disguises pornography, right? Because it’s really sex crimes that are being distributed online. And focus my efforts in, in that direction along with some policy initiatives. And that was the trajectory of my kind of professionally and the way that I first got activated to care about this issue was really through the influence of my dad who was very passionate about human rights issues growing up. He grew up in the midst of, you know, a tumultuous experience in Ahman Jordan where there was civil war. And he just became very attuned to you know, kind of the, the plight of, of oppressed groups and of war and of poverty, and of all those things that he really instilled in me and my sisters. And it was his, his influence. And we would often watch, you know, the BBC together in the news and documentaries.

(06:29):
And one, one day I remember, and I’ll never forget that he called me into the living room to watch a documentary with him. And it was about child sex trafficking in Calcutta, India. And I had seen a lot of things by that point in the human rights space that were stirring to me. But when I saw that it moved me in a way that nothing else had previously. It was so shocking, like so many of you who are listening to this, you know, at that time it wasn’t something that was often talked about. It wasn’t as well known as it is today. And when I heard about that for the first time, it was just so moved and I felt like I need to learn more about this. I need to dig in. And so I just really began to focus in that direction, and that’s kind of how I was set on the trajectory of focusing on this particular issue of sex trafficking.

Fight The New Drug (07:19):
Yeah. And something I really loved about your book is it’s so clear that your dad was an influence for you. You kind of dropped some of his nuggets of wisdom throughout your book, and it’s nice to see how that continued to fuel you and inspire you in this work that you do today. Kind of diving into roughly where your book starts, there is obviously some of that background information, but really we kind of go to the beginning of 2020 where you were kind of questioning, you know, speaking about how people are exploited online and kind of focusing in on that you were questioning whether the content on PornHub was really all consensual, could really all be consensual. Can you talk about how you began to look into that and also what you found? Well,

Laila Mickelwait (08:05):
Yes, definitely. So at the end of 2019 was when some headlines really began to catch my attention. Particularly there was a story about a 15-year-old girl from Florida, Broward County, Florida, who was missing for an entire year. And she was finally found when her mother was tipped off by a PornHub user that he had recognized her daughter on PornHub, and she found her missing daughter in 58 videos being raped and abused for profit. These were downloadable monetized videos, not only monetized with ads, but monetized by, paid a download PornHub earning 35% of the profit from each of the sale of the that girl’s abuse. And they were able to actually match her abuser’s face with surveillance footage from a seven 11 and locate the girl at his apartment and rescue her and intervene. And I was thinking, and that story was kind of haunting me towards the end of 2019, the beginning, right?

(09:04):
The beginning of 2020. I kept thinking about that story. There was also a really important investigation that came out at the end of 2019 by the London Sunday Times, and they found dozens of illegal videos within minutes, even children as young as three. And so these were in the back of my mind, and I was up late one night rocking my very sad, upset three month old baby and thinking about that story of that 15-year-old girl. And a question came to mind. The question was, how did that happen? Because Porn Up has presented itself to the world using millions and millions of marketing dollars as this mainstream, legit porn brand that only has quote unquote consenting adults on this site. Yet we had these news stories coming out. And so, you know, one of those wise words that my dad always used to say was, assumption is the mother of all screw up.

(10:09):
And I thought, we’re all assuming that this is legal and consensual content. How do we know? So I just said, I’m gonna test the upload system. I’m gonna see what it actually takes. So I put the baby to bed, and I got on my computer and laptop, recorded some video footage of the room and uploaded it to PornHub and discovered what millions of people actually already knew, because at that point they had 6.8 million videos being uploaded every year, not to mention all the images. So millions of people had already done this, right? But tested that upload system and found out that all it took was an email address to upload homemade sex videos onto this site. And there was no proof of age, no id no consent form, right? And that’s when I realized it was like that aha moment. It was like this inciting incident that the site is infested with videos of real sexual crime. And that’s kind of where the story began, was unexpectedly, honestly. It was not something that was planned. It wasn’t something where we’re like, you know, we’re gonna create this trafficking hub thing and like execute it. It was very organic and that it suddenly happened that I, I, I understood this process and then thought, oh my goodness, we have to do something about this. So,

Fight The New Drug (11:30):
Yeah, which is, which is remarkable. So many people have made assumptions about PornHub being a credible regulated platform because it’s so well known as the largest most recognizable porn brand, and they just think, oh, well, of course everything on there is fine. And so to so easily be able to identify it wasn’t, that is information that needed to shared. And tell us about how you went about sharing what you found.

Laila Mickelwait (11:57):
So the first thing I did was actually the only thing that I could do at that time, you know, I was still kind of on a part maternity leave situation where I was just basically taking care baby night and day. But at the same time really feeling like I didn’t wanna put down my work. So like, one of the only things I could do is just be nursing my baby and like have my phone in the other hand and just post on Twitter what, you know, a news story or like a, a piece of research or whatever. So I mean, that was really, at that moment, the only thing I could do was, I have to sound the alarm on this. So I started posting on Twitter to my few thousand followers at that time. And started just inspired to start the hashtag trafficking hub.

(12:48):
And it was really amazing to see how people just started to take notice. And they were shocked as much as I was, that this was the upload process. And they began to share. And it was like all these people started to come forward with bits of pieces of help. Like, you know, one random follower was like, we need to design that into the logo of PornHub. We need to make Trafficking hub. And another one was like, you need to go get the trafficking hub URL before PornHub takes it here, I’ll help you do that. And then, you know, someone designed the, the logo and somebody helped me get the URL and other people started to come forward, all this different bits of information left and right. So it really kind of evolved on social media, on Twitter X right? Twitter at the time. And and then, you know, I, I was thinking, well, it has to get out to more than just these Twitter followers.

(13:44):
Like, this isn’t really gonna do the job. We have to get this farther. So I had the idea like, let me write an op-ed about this. And I did, and I, I sent it out to a bunch of different outlets who rejected it. And one, you know, thankfully published it. And when that went out, people, then it kind of got to some more people and people were outraged. And one woman came forward to me and just said, you know, this is so horrible. We need to start a petition to shut down PornHub, and if you don’t do it, I’m gonna do it. And I said, oh, wow, okay, that’s a great idea. Like, we need to do that. And then that’s kind of how I just opened a change.org copy and pasted my op-ed into it, hit play, you know, publish. And then suddenly that went viral and it was like amazing to watch thousands of people like suddenly starting to sign and share this petition.

(14:36):
And it took off like that. Like that’s how it, the genesis of how it all just very organically evolved starting with social media. So I would say just like a point to listeners, you know, don’t ever discredit your share or your like, or, you know, because it makes an actual difference. And we wouldn’t be where we are today without all of the individual activists who just took a minute, not even a minute, like less than a minute, right? To share a post or retweeted tweet or sign that petition and share it. And what a difference it makes, because when everybody does that together, it makes a huge difference. So I always say like, every, like every share, every, you know, petition sign is precious and important, and like, don’t ever discredit your activism because you’re not out in, you know, in parliament or in congress, you know, making a speech or something like that. Like your likes and shares are important too. So I just wanna add that.

Fight The New Drug (15:36):
Yeah. And I’m so glad you did, because I think that’s such a huge part of this entire issue we’re gonna talk about with PornHub is that so many other people who’ve pursued this have maybe been intimidated out of continuing their investigations into PornHub or continuing to call someone out. And, and certainly if you weren’t the person you are, many things have happened that could have intimidated you out of this. But because this movement kind of started and there was enough of that support coming from everyone who had seen this and everyone who was interested in this, which we will talk so much more about, and it’s detailed so well in the book, and I encourage our listeners to check that out. It does make a difference, and it’s so encouraging to see what this movement can do. I wanna back up just a little bit. We mentioned trafficking hub, we talked about the petition. We’ll talk about it a little bit more, but for anyone who’s maybe unclear of why you called this trafficking hub, can you explain a little bit where that came from?

Laila Mickelwait (16:40):
Yes. So really important is to understand the definition of trafficking. And a lot of people may not know, but according to our federal and international definition of trafficking, when you commercialize a sex act that involves an underage victim, so anybody under the age of 18, or if that sex act was induced by force fraud or coercion, then that is an act of trafficking. Now, because every single video on PornHub exists to make money for PornHub. These are highly commercialized videos. Like they’re not out there, you know, they call it free porn, right? It’s not really free. It’s highly monetized and it’s making hundreds of millions of dollars for the parent company of PornHub. And because any underage video or any video that’s non-consensual right in induced by forced fraud coercion is an act of trafficking. Every video like that on PornHub is trafficking is an actual crime taking place. So that’s where the idea of this being a trafficking hub came to be. Not only that, but you know, in, in, in more of like the traditional sense of victims who were trafficked being filmed and uploaded to the site is also like you’ve had girls do porn, sex trafficking, operation victims here on your podcast. I know. And they were trafficked and then that exploitation was filmed and uploaded online. So that’s where trafficking hub comes from.

Fight The New Drug (18:20):
Yes. And I think a couple important things to note in testing, how easy the upload process was for you, how quickly you could do it, just reiterating there was no policy in place. You didn’t have to submit an id, there was no way for PornHub to verify not only your age, but the age of anyone who would’ve been in the video that you uploaded. So there are no safeguards in place to ensure minors aren’t being put on this platform at this time. Right. And also, you talk about this a little bit in the book, but you were kind of seeing once you uploaded this and you’re seeing, you know, what tags are linked to different things you’re seeing, it’s not hiding the force fraud and coercion that’s in these videos. Those are tags used, you know, abuse, manipulation, coercion, those are tags used to promote this content that is by definition abusive.

(19:10):
And, and this is probably a good time to add a quick little trigger warning for some of the conversations we might have in this are a little bit descriptive to help really detail what is actually happening on PornHub. And the book is fairly detailed as well. But I think knowing that information is how we really understand how big of a problem this is and kind of why you took the steps you took to help incite this movement against it. So I think that clarification is so important. I do just wanna say anyone who wants to listen or to read the op-Ed, you first wrote for the Washington Examiner called Time to Shut Down PornHub. You can find that online. And then also the petition you mentioned. Tell us a little bit more about where people can find that and what happened with the petition.

Laila Mickelwait (20:01):
Sure. Thanks for that kind of disclaimer. And just to just emphasize what you said, you know, it wasn’t an oops situation where this eagle content, illegal content slipped through. It was promoted, it was you know, literally promoted in, in a way where they, there would be a blatantly illegal video that’s tagged that way that’s titled that way, that’s clearly that way when you watch it. And that would’ve been promoted in some cases, that there’s documentation of what happened. They promote it on the home page to get more clicks and views. The categories that you could select that PornHub created themselves were insinuating illegal content on the site. So all that to say yes that is part of the egregious nature of what has happened. And so with the petition we can, yeah, so it, it started to take off and it was amazing to watch.

(21:01):
It was exciting to see. Nev never expected that it would have this virality, which it did. And it’s like thousands of people a day were signing and sharing it. And that was amazing because it helped generate interest from the media into what was going on, because it became newsworthy that, you know, it’s not just like this woman on Twitter just making some noise on her Twitter account. Like actually there’s thousands and thousands now, tens of thousands, now hundreds of thousands and, and then millions, right. Of people Yeah. Who are saying no, this is not okay. We have to hold this company accountable. And, and so it became very important for Newsworthiness to get headlines, to get pressure, to get a spotlight and to get the attention of important you know, journalists and lawyers and whistleblowers and victims. Like, oh, more than anything, it was, it was really important because they were victims of PornHub who saw the petition going viral and said, that happened to me too, and started to reach out whistleblowers from the company who saw it and said, yes, this is true. I have to reach out. And so in that sense, again, some people might think it’s just a petition, like what does a petition do anyway? But it actually was very powerful and still is very powerful.

Fight The New Drug (22:24):
And with that, speaking of survivors specifically shortly after you created the Justice Defense Fund to help support survivors of online sex trafficking, tell us a little bit about that.

Laila Mickelwait (22:35):
Yeah, so the Justice Defense Fund, we exist to support survivors in their pursuit of justice. We wanna help support them in that endeavor to help them access the costly and historically very unequal justice system, especially when they need to pursue justice against big corporations like MindGeek and PornHub and its financial enablers, for example. And to walk alongside them as they go through that very difficult process of pursuing justice in court to also support with investigative research and, and other means to help you know, actually hold these companies financially ACA accountable. Because what we understand is that these companies, their decisions are made based on how much profit they can make and what is best for their bank account and what motivates them the most and what hurts them the most. And how you can get kind of the, the pain point for these corporations is money, right?

(23:38):
So pursuing civil litigation is a really powerful tool to not only give much needed justice to victims, which they deserve, and no amount of money could ever compensate for what’s happened to them. But it’s important for them to receive restitution, but also to push these companies and any others that would act like them to change the ways that they do business. So that’s important. It also creates an important blueprint for criminal prosecution because the information that’s uncovered in legal discovery process can be used for criminal prosecution as well. And then JDF engages in public pressure initiatives. So, you know, similar to, you know, what, we’re all working together to do a trafficking hub, just trying to keep this in the spotlight so that we can pressure these companies and like, again, they’re enablers to change the way that they operate. So we could see industry-wide transformation. So we wanna see policy change, we wanna see justice, civil justice, and at the end of the day, we wanna see transformation so that this doesn’t happen again. So that’s the purpose of JDF .

Fight The New Drug (24:47):
That’s amazing work that you’re doing there. And also helpful context to know, really, this is documented so well in this book, but money is, you know, following the money gets you answers on what’s happening and also reducing the, the revenue streams for this monopoly that is PornHub and, and MindGeek is how we actually hit them where it hurts and make a difference. And you mentioned in the book how and, and a several people who’ve worked there, which we’ll talk a little bit about really said they only care about money and they don’t care that they’re gambling essentially with people’s lives. They’re playing a game of Russian roulette with people’s lives. They don’t care if it makes them money. And I think that is so clear if you kind of follow the evidence. But bringing this back to PornHub, at what point did they respond to all of this information that was coming out about their content? How did they respond? What did that begin to look like at the time?

Laila Mickelwait (25:48):
At first they tried to ignore it. They thought, this is just gonna go away, so let’s just be quiet, let’s lay low. We’re gonna tell our employees, look, this is all lies. None of it’s true. It’s all gonna go away. But it didn’t go away. It started to grow and grow and grow as we’re, you know, heard earlier with regard to the petition. And then, you know, 10 dozens of headlines. And then soon there’s like hundreds of headlines and it’s getting bigger, right? And it’s not going away. But, so that at first the mode was just be quiet, hide, right? And just it’ll pass. Then they realized it’s not passing. So then they started to speak out in the media to try to defend themselves. They tried to defend the indefensible. And one thing that they did to do that wasn’t they, they, they didn’t fight it on the merits.

(26:34):
They didn’t come forward with facts to say, oh, actually we are not doing X, Y, and Z. because they were doing it. So what they had to do was to lash out with attacks on character, credibility, motivation to try to defame, to try to discredit, to try to silence those who were speaking out with the actual truth. And so that was their mode of attack, that was their mode of defense. Instead of like a legit corporation who actually had any scrap of ethics, would actually acknowledge the problem, would immediately do whatever was necessary to fix it, even though they’d been aware of it, right? Since 2006. because that’s how they set it up. But that’s not what they did. They lashed out to try to silence and try to stop the criticism instead of trying to actually change what they were doing. That was the reaction.

Fight The New Drug (27:29):
And just to speak a little bit to the credibility of all of the claims you made about PornHub in, you know, these calls to shut it down in your op-ed, and in the petition you basically detailed all of the things you were seeing on the platform that were problematic. Why, why we should shut it down and executives should be held accountable. And I think it’s so interesting that the only response they had to the initial op-Ed, the only correction they requested of the entity that published it was that you clarify that MindGeek, which is the parent company of PornHub, which we’ll talk a little bit more about in a moment that they clarify that MindGeek is technically based in Luxembourg, even though it’s headquartered in Montreal, which was initially said. So the fact that you made all of these claims and the only thing they refuted, which if any of these were lies or defamatory, they could have very easily come back stating that. And they didn’t is so, so, so telling of not only what was happening, but what they knew was happening. And interesting once again, pointing back to the money and the profits that they would clarify where they’re actually based for tax purposes in this article. So

Laila Mickelwait (28:39):
Yes, it was so telling. And so I mean, when you have no defense, you have no defense, right? And they, and they knew and that that was such proof that they knew that everything was a hundred percent true, that was being said, and there’s nothing that they could do to defend it because it was, it is true and it was true. And yeah, that was just, you know, an incredible moment to see that yeah, all they had to correct was all they could correct, right? All they could correct was were registered in Luxembourg for tax purposes.

Fight The New Drug (29:16):
And I think speaking a little bit further to some of those character assassin assassinations, they essentially tried to make because they couldn’t fight anything on merit I guess is the question. Were there people trying to stop you from continuing your work and, you know, what did that look like and what kept you going through it?

Laila Mickelwait (29:36):
Yeah, yeah. And it wasn’t just, you know, I’d say it wasn’t just me was anybody who was hopping their hu up above water to talk about the truth, they would be, you know, shut down or you know, attacked online and things like that. And you know, I know that our kind of the movement, anti-sex trafficking movement, who has called out this issue in the porn industry in many different forms, and many different organizations have faced similar assaults on character and credibility. And it’s really sad to see that reaction in the way that people have really suffered from having to defend against these kinds of character assaults again and again and again. But that’s exactly, you know, what happened. And it, it was a difficult part of the battle. It was, I shouldn’t have been surprised that that’s the method that they used to try to you know, squash what was going on.

(30:42):
but it was, it was like very difficult to have two battles where you’re battling for justice for you know, to stop this criminal activity from proliferating on the internet and hold the company accountable. So that’s like one ba battle. And then there’s like a parallel battle for the narrative about what’s going on for the media narrative, for the truth about, you know, the who, the who we are and what we’re trying to do and all of that for the truth to be told there. So that was a difficult part of the process that is, you know, important to acknowledge that there’s, you know, two battles going on.

Fight The New Drug (31:21):
If I can interject to help our listeners really understand why that’s so difficult, I think it’s important to note and remind people that PornHub is so normalized, like, consuming porn culturally, especially on PornHub. It’s so, so, so normalized in our culture. So if PornHub comes out and says, oh, these people making a ruckus are just, you know, moral prudes who are upset about X, Y, and Z most people will just believe them because they don’t know all of these things about PornHub. They don’t know this information that you’re exposing. And so you’re also having to combat this like social norm at the same time that then you’re trying to have to defend yourself and maintain your rapport with the public and credibility so that people will trust the information that you’re sharing in it is kind of an uphill battle, but you continue to do it.

(32:09):
And I just wanna say one of my favorite lines from your book is actually referencing addressing payment processors, which we’ll talk about a little bit as well. But you said, just because something seems impossible doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. And I think that’s such a good reminder to all of us and a really good testament to who you are and why you’ve been able to continue this work despite kind of the attacks you’ve received and so many others. So thank you. And also please tell us a little bit about what you think kept you going amidst all of this.

Laila Mickelwait (32:43):
Yeah, I, you know, I think probably one of the most important things that helped keep me going in the midst, and I’ll tell, I’ll be perfectly honest, and I’m very vulnerable about this in the book, that there was multiple times, you know, that I just said like, I’ve had enough and I don’t wanna do this anymore. like, this is too hard. You know, I think I’m gonna break if I keep going. But I couldn’t stop. And I think a lot of that was just because I came face to face with so much evil that was being perpetrated against these victims, seeing it over and over being a witness to these crimes that I felt a real responsibility that I, you know, I have to help, I have to continue to help see justice fully served so that these victims will encounter justice, but also so will stop this from happening again.

(33:52):
And so I think as traumatic as it was to witness these horrific crimes unfolding on this mainstream widely, and it was just this weirdest thing where you’ll have, like, you’ll be watching Saturday Night Live and they’re basically doing a commercial for PornHub, and, you know, people are proudly wearing their apparel and the street and like everybody is just laughing and joking about PornHub, and they have all these, you know, their popular social media and all this, and at the same time witnessing like the most horrific crimes you could imagine being perpetrated openly on their website. And, but experiencing those moments, I think instead of just kind of it shutting me down, I, I felt like it gave me more fuel to keep going, and I kind of turned it into that. And encountering victims and hearing directly from survivors and developing those relationships, I think was also so important because it’s like, as hard as this is for me, it’s nothing compared to what they’re going through, and it’s nothing compared to what they will continue to go through because their rape and their abuse has now been like immortalized online.

(35:11):
It’ll, it’ll never end because they’re in a constant game of whack-a-mole, trying to get this off the internet forever. And so just even being able to put into perspective anything that I was facing in comparison to what they were facing, and it was just like, no, this is, we, we gotta keep going. Like this isn’t, we’re not gonna stop. So I think those are some things that really helped. Besides the fact that I honestly felt like through this process, I wanted to honor my dad’s legacy. He passed in 2014, and, you know, I talk about this promise I made to him that I wasn’t ever gonna stop the fight for justice on behalf of you know, this whole issue of tech trafficking. I didn’t realize at the time, like, you know, what would happen with Porn Hub specifically, but I do. But I think it was important. I felt like I had a commitment and I, I wanted to honor him and make him proud and not quit. He always told me like, be tough. Like, don’t, you know, don’t quit when things get hard. And so I think that really helped me.

Fight The New Drug (36:13):
It’s so easy to see in your book all of the times that I think so many people would’ve thrown in the towel or would’ve given up because you were experiencing so many things because you were speaking out about this. And I think also something that’s so encouraging about seeing all of this information together in the book is that you were clearly a threat to PornHub, right? Like, you were doing the right thing and this movement was the right thing, and it, and it is making a difference. It has made a difference. But there was some encouragement in knowing, well, if, if I’m a threat to them, then it’s because I’m doing something right. And they’re afraid, they’re afraid that it’s going to hurt their business. So I, I loved being able to see that. And I do wanna talk a little bit about the business. For anyone who is maybe heard about PornHub but is generally not super well-informed about who runs PornHub what the business structure looks like. Can you just briefly kind of describe that for anyone who needs that context before we dive into some of these other pieces?

Laila Mickelwait (37:19):
Sure. So PornHub is, you know, at least was in 2020, the most popular and largest pornographic website that had 130 million visits a day, 47 billion visits to the site a year. Enough content uploaded that it would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to back. Just the content uploaded in one year selling 4.6 billion ad impressions on their content every single day. Much of which was illegal as we know now. And their business model is structured on this idea of free porn. And it’s basically the way that the business model works is they have to have an enormous amount of content because they make money by driving enormous amounts of traffic to their site that they monetize by selling ad impressions to that traffic to those people. And so that’s why they had developed this system where they wanted as little friction as possible with uploading or having content be uploaded.

(38:25):
You know, it wasn’t important to them what was being uploaded as long as content was being uploaded. So they, so that they had URLs and they had that inventory to be picked up by Google and driven to the site. You know, one whistleblower said, Google’s where PornHub lives or dies because they have to have that inventory to be picked up in Google and drive that traffic to the site. So, so for them, like they wanted unlimited amounts of content and that is why they had set up a system where it all it took was an email address to upload. Like, how easy can we make it? At the same time understanding that these are user generated, this is the YouTube of porn, right? These are literally anybody with an iPhone can become a pornographer these days, videotape a sex act in the back of a car, in a park, in a hotel anywhere, and then upload it to the site knowing they weren’t verifying agent consent.

(39:22):
And that’s the perfect recipe for the site to become infested with videos of actual crime. And so that’s kind of how they were set up, and that’s the business model and how they were making money. And so they’re owned by a parent company. So PornHub is one of a bunch of porn tube sites that are owned by a parent company that was called MindGeek until recently. They renamed themselves recently ilo, which is interesting to me because in their history as a company, they’ve renamed themselves multiple times. Every time they get in legal trouble, they seem to sell and renames. So they started off as mansef, then they became Manwin, then became MindGeek, and now they’re io. So anyway, they’re owned by that parent company. And that parent company owns, you know, it’s estimated that they have a monopoly on the global porn industry where they’re own owning most of the world’s, most popular porn sites and brands and the porn tube sites that they own operate the same way. So u porn tube bait, x tube, gay tube red tube, you know, all of these tubes and that’s their ma moneymakers are, are mostly, mostly the tube sites.

Fight The New Drug (40:33):
Yes. And because they have this monopoly of the free and the paid sites, they use the free sites to generate traffic to the paid sites. It’s a perfect little funneling system, and then they’re monetizing content on all of the sites through advertisements. So that’s really how they’re making so much money.

Laila Mickelwait (40:50):
Right. And as far as monetization, so you know, it was monetization of ads and they had pay to download content where you could pay to download a particular video. This, those were a minority on the site. About 20% of videos were like that. And then they were selling premium subscriptions, which was, you know, there was this moment in 2020 during Covid where they offered, you know, suddenly they removed their paywall for premium and they offered premium subscriptions to the whole entire world. That’s basically what it is.

Fight The New Drug (41:20):
So with that context of the way the company operates you mentioned earlier kind of with regard to how they responded to some of this information coming out. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the claims they’d made about the content moderation process and then also what you found out about the content moderation process and how you found that out?

Laila Mickelwait (41:46):
Yes. So they said that we have a very large and extensive team of human moderators that are reviewing every single piece of content before it goes live on the site. And that was kind of their statement that they came out in defense of themselves with this large and extensive team of human moderators. However, the truth was that they actually had a very unbelievably small team of human moderators in Cyprus. In fact, it was 30 to 31 of these. Now, like for, just for comparison at the time, like Facebook would have 15,000 and so they had 30 to 31 that were working at any 24 hour period for all of MindGeek. So this is not just for PornHub, but this is for all of mind geek’s porn tube sites. They only had 10 of those working per eight hour shift reviewing these, you know, millions of videos uploaded per year onto the site.

(42:47):
And they were just skipping past them because they had quotas. Like they had expectations that they had to meet a certain amount of videos. You know, it was said that they would be reprimanded if they watched less than 700 per eight hour shift. Now think about lunch break, you know, bathroom breaks, like how much time would you have and how many videos they have to skip through. Some of the moderators were watching up to 2000, skipping through up to 2000 videos per shift, and they would watch these with the sound off much of the time. And that’s what we learned was the process. And I think what’s also important to note is that no human moderator can tell the difference between a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old. Like not even a p pediatrician can do that on a, on a, a consistent basis or any basis at all. Nobody can tell the difference from a human moderator perspective between rough sex and rape. Besides that, a lot of the content is consensually filmed sex acts between, you know, two people who decided they were gonna film that they didn’t agree to have it uploaded online. Right? We know that as all kinds of image-based sexual abuse, there’s no way they can tell that. So this whole idea of human moderation as this big, you know, defense was really absurd. But that was what their defense was. But the truth about that was very different.

Fight The New Drug (44:20):
And saying, there’s an extensive team of human moderators, so it’s no problem that we don’t have verify ID or age or consent. It’s no problem because we’re taking care of that with our moderators. And then to learn there are 30 moderators, and even if they were all doing 2000 videos per shift, the most someone was possibly doing the math, doesn’t math, the number of videos being uploaded per year. And you talk a little bit about how you learned this information in speaking with someone who worked there. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience?

Laila Mickelwait (44:51):
Yeah, I actually have spoken to multiple moderators who reached out from PornHub MindGeek. But yeah, there was one in particular that was especially helpful and even gave me their internal documents proving, showing the schedule, showing the names of the moderators and exactly what shifts they were working and and all of that to, to prove that this wasn’t true. That they had an extensive team of human moderators. So yeah, that was a really important, you know, it, I was hoping from the beginning I said, I imagine if I could actually just talk to one of these moderators and they could just tell me, you know, what’s going on. And it actually happened and it was so helpful to have that information

Fight The New Drug (45:39):
And to speak a little bit more to the moderation process. Can you tell us a little bit about what you heard from survivors of what their experiences were in trying to get content removed? You know, if there was actually an extensive team of moderators who could respond to claims of abuse or non-consensual content you would think things would be taken down quickly, but tell us a little bit about the reality even in, especially when once law enforcement got involved and the duration of time things still took.

Laila Mickelwait (46:08):
I can definitely speak on that. And really quick regarding just one other aspect of the moderation I wanna point out with their defense statements that I thought was very important as to their complicity and responsibility for the illegal content was they began to claim that every single video was viewed and approved before it would be uploaded to the site. We know they were just skipping through the videos, but let’s take their statement, let’s take them at their word for that. That they would say that we viewed and approved every single video that would include a video of a 12-year-old boy from Alabama drugged, overpowered, and raped in 23 videos. It would include videos of a toddler, right? It would include videos of clearly underage, it would include videos of women who were actually unconscious limp. They’re not acting, it’s obvious. There’s, they’re, they’re assailant and trigger warning right now would be touching their eyeballs, right?

(47:12):
Tickling their feet drugged, right? Like all of that. So where it’s so obvious, right, not from just watching that video, it would be so obvious that this is a crime scene and they’re saying that their moderators viewed, approved, then monetized with ads and all of that, that content. So to me, and to any attorneys that are pursuing these cases, that statement was so important because basically you’re saying you, you with knowledge distributed this illegal content going to victims who had their videos on the site, so many of them again and again and again, would have the same exact story. We reached out, we were ignored, we reached out, we had no response. If we did have a response, so many of them would say we were hassled for proof that we were a victim hassled for proof that we were underage or that it’s non-consensual before they would entertain the idea of removing it, which to me is so egregious because there was no requirement of id or proof that it was consensual to be uploaded in the first place.

(48:28):
but yeah, they would go for you know, weeks, months, years sometimes they had no response at all. And in the case of even some where law enforcement would get involved and they would reach out to MindGeek PornHub and they would be ignored as well. That case of that 12-year-old boy from Alabama law enforcement reached out multiple times and were ignored when they tried to get those videos down for months. So that was the way that things were happening. And it’s not surprising now understanding what we know now. That was uncovered in legal discovery in a class action lawsuit in California, that they only had one person employed five days a week to review videos flagged by users for terms of service violations, including illegal content. And they had a policy where they would only put a video in line for review if it had over 15 flags. So what that means is that a victim could flag their video 15 times and it wouldn’t have even been put in line for review. They had a queue, a backlog of 706,000 videos that were flagged. They’re making hundreds of millions of dollars every year. That fact alone tells us the priority that they put on safety and actually responding to victims. It didn’t exist at

Fight The New Drug (50:01):
All. And I think it’s worth noting, you do mention this in the book, it, it is content that was so clearly illegal content, abusive content that users were commenting and saying, Hey, this is x, y, or Z term. And with so many comments, it was abundantly clear. And even then this was still the process because going back to kind of content is king, they need as much content as they don’t want to have a process for easy content removal because then that means the numbers are gonna go down, right?

Laila Mickelwait (50:34):
Yeah. This is what even the moderators themselves have said multiple times, and they said, you know, our job was to let as much content go through as possible. Like our job was not to limit content or stop content, it was to allow as much content to be uploaded to the, to the site and remain on the site as possible because that’s what makes money, right? Yeah. So that’s, that’s how things worked. And with regard to the comments, yeah, they had 11 million comments per year uploaded to PornHub alone. So many of those comments would be flagging illegal content, this is rape, this is child abuse. On and on and on, where users themselves were saying this. And You know, they would actually censor the words that indicated criminal content and leave that content on the site. At the same time, you know, they actually had set the technology in place to detect spam. So like, you know, if pump someone’s leaving a spam comment advertising a product and they leave that, too many times they would go suspend that account. This is what the moderators told us. But, you know, flagging child, sexual abuse, rape, those would stay. However, the action wouldn’t be taken on that video.

Fight The New Drug (51:52):
And I think it’s important for listeners to understand too, even once a video was removed you talk about one specific instance where the FBI got involved and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was able to, after two weeks, which is still far too long to get a, a video of clear child sexual abuse or legally child pornography to get that video removed, the still remained. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Laila Mickelwait (52:21):
Yeah, that’s one, you know, thing that kind of was a mystery to me when I first saw it and then realized, I know this is exactly why, and it was confirmed by employees at MindGeek why that was happening. So when the National Center for Missing Exploited Children was demanding that it wasn’t just that video, so, you know, I saw it happen on that video, but then went into Google and typed those words. because what would happen is they would take the video down, finally, they would take it down if they were forced to, right? And then in that space where you would’ve had that child’s abuse, it would say we’re removed at the request of ncmec, the National Center for Missing Exploited Children. However, they would leave the title, the tags, the views, you know, all of that live, right? The URL that originally went to that video would be live.

(53:13):
Now if you click on that URL, you’re gonna get this screen, but you’re gonna see ads, you’re gonna see ads all over that video, and then you’re gonna be see other videos that they’ll recommend based on their algorithm that you may want to see that are similar content all over that video. And we learned like the reason why they were doing that is because they wanted that inventory of URLs. They wanted that content be to be able to, you know, catch traffic on Google and drive traffic to the site. And so that’s why they were doing this. And it was, yeah, just another layer, layer of, of the complicity in, in the way that the company was operating.

Fight The New Drug (53:55):
In addition to the content moderators, you’ve mentioned, you’ve spoken to some other employees of MindGeek at the time. Can you tell us a little bit about either former or current at the time employees and what some of those conversations looked like?

Laila Mickelwait (54:10):
Yeah, so yeah, in addition to moderators, number of other employees who worked in different departments were reaching out and, you know, each one had different insights into different parts and aspects of the business and the leadership and the ownership, and would help explain, you know, why certain things were happening or reveal things that we weren’t aware of that were happening. You know, one of those was when an employee reached out and said FYI, you thought the credit card companies actually stopped doing business with PornHub, but they went back I, and you know, I didn’t realize that. And so bits and pieces of really critical information were coming not just from the moderators, but from others within the company as well, which kind of helped just put this puzzle together of that’s detailed in the book.

Fight The New Drug (55:07):
Can you speak at all about specifically your interactions with Fabian and tell people who that is?

Laila Mickelwait (55:13):
Yeah, so Fabian is the Zuckerberg of porn, is what the media has called him. So, you know, he was a porn tycoon, right? Formerly known as the king of porn. And he purchased what was then mansef and made it man win, and under that, right as Porn Hub. And he helped really put PornHub on the map and really popularize it to the extent that it’s popularized today. And yeah, so he had sold PornHub by the time Trafficking Hub started, I think it was seven years that he had years prior that he had sold the company. And in the midst of a viral moment in 2020, he reached out to say that he wanted to help with the cause.

Fight The New Drug (56:06):
Did you believe him at first when he did ?

Laila Mickelwait (56:09):
Very suspicious, right? ? No, I mean, I, I I was just shocked actually that, that he had approached me and he was saying and very suspicious and at the same time really wanting to engage and learn what I could from this person who was basically the top right at the, of the, of the chain at MindGeek, who was the former owner of the company, the Zuckerberg of porn. And and so I tried to engage in conversation with him and get whatever information that he was willing to share to try to, you know, get that, because that was a very valuable source and resource at that time. So that’s, that’s how he ended up approaching.

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Intro (58:26):
Thanks for joining us on this episode of Consider Before Consuming, consider before consuming is brought to you by Fight the new Drug. Fight The New Drug is a non-religious and a non-legislative organization that exists to provide individuals the opportunity to make an informed decision regarding pornography by raising awareness on its harmful effects, using only science, facts and personal accounts. Check out the episode notes for resources mentioned in this episode. If you find this podcast helpful, consider subscribing and leaving a review. Thanks again for listening. We invite you to increase your self-awareness, look both ways, check your blind spots and consider before consuming.