How Pornhub Became The Internet’s Biggest Crime Scene - Laila Mickelwait

Pornhub is not a porn site, it's a crime scene. What's that mean?

It means exactly what you just said. So, what I discovered, uh, about five years ago was what millions of people already knew, in that all it took to upload to the world's YouTube of porn, so this is user-generated porn, uh, the biggest porn site in the world at the time. Actually, it was the fifth most trafficked website in the world at the time. I made this discovery that all it took to upload to Pornhub was an email address that anybody, in under 10 minutes, could upload to the site, and they were not verifying ID to make sure that these were not children, and they were not verifying consent to make sure that these are not rape or trafficking victims. And because of that, the site had actually become infested with videos of real sexual crime. So, we're talking about child abuse, child sexual abuse material, we call it, this is child rape. It's also self-generated child sexual abuse material where children would be, you know, filming themselves and sharing it, and then that would get uploaded to Pornhub, which is completely illegal to be viewing and distributing that content. Um, to adult rape, you know, unconscious women, completely drunk, non-consenting, to, all the way to what we used to call revenge porn. So this would be image-based sexual abuse. So all kinds of non-consensual content, and even copyright, uh, you know, violations, where this is illegal content because it was stolen material that was being uploaded to the site. So, that was the state of Pornhub, and, you know, they had, at the time, they had 6.9 million videos that were uploaded, uh, in 2019, and this was, you know ... My fight to hold them accountable for these crimes started in 2020. And at that time, they had 56 million pieces of content uploaded to the site, and they had actually, uh, 170 million visitors per day, 62 billion visitors per year, and enough content being uploaded that it would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to back. So that's how much content was being uploaded. And mind you, this is now anybody with an iPhone. So anybody, anywhere in the world that had a camera could film a sex act and with no checks whatsoever, using a VPN even, to be even more anonymous. They could upload this content to Pornhub and it was infested with videos of crime.

Why was this your job to find? This seems like ... 62 billion visits per year, one of those 62 billion visits could have sprung somebody else into action. W- why was this you?

I mean, this is one of the things that really kind of amazes me even now, is that this was something that was h- hiding in plain sight. So, this was under everybody's noses. Like, really anybody could have sounded the alarm on this, and it's, it's amazing that it took from 2007 to 2020 for it to get any attention, that this was actually going on. And, you know, I am just, I am actually honored to have the opportunity to shine a light on this and to, you know, be helping the many, many, many countless victims now who've had their trauma immortalized on this site. Uh, and so I don't know why it took this long t- for it to come to light. But there's this saying that I love, and it's, i- it's, "It's an idea whose time had come." And I think that that's actually true. It was an idea. Trafficking Hub, which is the movement that I started to hold Pornhub accountable, it started with a hashtag on social media and grew and went viral. But I think Trafficking Hub was an idea whose time had finally come. And enough was enough, and it was time to, you know, expose what was going on.