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🌊 The Woman Who’s Taking Down Pornhub
How anti-sex trafficking activist Laila Mickelwait is bringing the world’s most popular porn site to its knees
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By Max Towey
Pornhub is the ninth most visited website in the world. But in the last five years, a series of exposés have revealed the site to be not just a library of adult videos, but the world’s largest crime scene.
In 2020, the New York Times’ Nick Kristof published a damning report on Pornhub, alleging that it knowingly monetized child rape, revenge porn, and violence at a mass scale. This spring, Kristof released another report that documented how 706,000 Pornhub videos flagged by users for depicting rape or assaults on children hadn’t been removed. The reason? Pornhub’s content moderators – whose soul-sucking jobs require them to screen thousands of porn videos per day – only review a video once it has been flagged 16 times. Some of the videos featuring children had been viewed millions of times.
Joining Kristof in this anti-Pornhub crusade was Laila Mickelwait, an anti-sex trafficking activist who has taken the battle against the company and other exploitative websites to the mainstream. Together, her and Kristof’s efforts have led the site to take down over 80% of its content; prompted Visa and Mastercard to cut ties; every major advertiser to boycott the site; and 16 states to effectively ban it.
Yet Pornhub remains widely visited and highly profitable, driving billions of dollars to the Canadian fund – Ethical Capital Partners – that owns it.
Now, Mickelwait is going one step further: Having already led what the Financial Times called “probably the biggest takedown of content in internet history,” she is spearheading an effort to “shut down Pornhub.”
I talked to her to better understand her fight against Big Porn. We feature our lightly edited conversation below.
Max T: Porn is a word that makes people squirm, even though it’s all around us. Over half of men watch porn, and the number of women watching it has soared in recent years. What led you to the issue?
Laila: My work as an anti-trafficking advocate led me to this issue. After over a decade of fighting sex trafficking, I noticed that in our digital world, trafficking is filmed, monetized, and globally distributed for profit. Stories like a 15-year-old from Florida found in 58 rape videos on Pornhub and cases of children as young as three being abused online caught my attention. I wanted to investigate how such content was uploaded to Pornhub, the world’s most popular porn site, and its ties to sex trafficking and child sexual abuse.
Max T: Who is the "Mark Zuckerberg of porn," and what role did he play in shaping today’s porn industry?
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Editor’s Note
We’re very curious to hear what you all think about Laila’s efforts to take down Pornhub. Do you think Pornhub should be taken down? Should their executives be prosecuted? Let us know by replying to this email.
Speaking of replies, we got a lot of emails in response to yesterday’s article on kink at Pride events. We share a handful of those below.
Larissa wrote:
From my experience in the kink community consent is one of the biggest foundations of safe and respectful kink. I have had to sign waivers, prove i'm over 18 and conduct myself in a way that is respectful of others regardless of if we share the same kinks. Pride parades are a public event, As someone who is involved in kink and is also a parent I would not be ok with my kid seeing kink related activities at ANY public event. She is not 18+ and she cannot consent to viewing these types of activities. While I do want her to have a broad worldview of people from different walks of life putting her in a position to watch Kink or Kink-adjacent activities is inappropriate.
Maggie from NY wrote:
"No kink at pride" has been a huge queer-infighting topic for years, it's certainly not a new trend, so I don't think it's to blame for why corporations are less involved. The notion that being gay is the same as, or a pathway to, public sexual deviancy is like the oldest homophobic idea in the book. Trump's anti-DEI movement and the corporate fear that shoppers will boycott stores with pride collections are all the same thing - not two contrasting reasons for why corporations are backing away from pride this year. It's no longer a taboo to publicly say you want to see less gay people in your country, in fact, in some areas its more profitable to market to people who feel that way than gay people. You can't separate cultural shifts from the dominant political forces of that culture.
Separately, people have always worn bits of bondage gear and harnesses to pride, that isn't new at all. There are family-friendly pride events, and there are pride events for queer adults. Why do we expect everything to be safe for children? It's your job as a parent to vet what you do and don't want your kid to see, it's not my responsibility to curtail all of my public behavior around the possibility that I might encounter a child.
And Shane wrote:
As a father of a gay son, the way pride has been “appropriated” to use liberal nomenclature by the kink and fetish crowd is sickening. Anyone who thinks it is ok for children to see men performing fellatio on other men in the streets and on floats should be labeled as child abusers. That is not ok. What you do behind closed doors is your business. I dont want my children to see hetro people doing that either. I dont care what your orientation is. They can have a private venue that is off limits to people under 18 and do that, but not on public streets. I feel bad for plain ol gay men and women who have lost their celebration to people who only want carnal satisfaction publicly
And, lastly, in case you missed them, find this week’s stories below:
Thank you all for reading. We hope you have fantastic weekends. We’ll be back tomorrow.
–Max and Max