By Gavin Boyle
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) is sounding the alarm that pornography websites knowingly share illegal content such as child material or rape to attract even more users.
“Pornography website algorithms lead users to violent, racist, and even criminal content like child sexual abuse material, rape, and sexual assault — this is a feature, not a bug, of these exploitative websites,” Haley McNamara, the senior vice president of Strategic Initiatives and programs at NCOSE, said in a statement.
“Personal responsibility of any abuser is paramount, full stop. At the same time as the crisis of online child sexual abuse material continues to rise, we are a foolish society if we do not take the on-ramps and escalating factors seriously,” McNamara added. “We know that Pornhub and other pornography websites have profited from the sexual abuse of women, children, and men on their platforms. This will only continue if the pornography industry isn’t held accountable.”
In 2023, Pornhub admitted that it had knowingly shared, and profited from, sexual abuse material uploaded to its site between the years of 2017 and 2019. This admission of guilt came from the site after hundreds of lawsuits were filed by women who were uploaded onto the site without their consent and ignored when contacting Pornhub to take videos down.
Following a New York Times exposé piece published in late 2020, the site purged nearly 50% of its content and its parent company later rebranded to try and distance itself from its dirty past.
“Pornhub’s parent company is desperately trying to rehabilitate its image from the litany of sexual abuses it has fostered and the lives it has damaged,” McNamara said in 2023. “MindGeek/Aylo, or whatever the pornography purveyors want to call it this week, is still the same company that systematically hosted and profited from child sexual abuse, sex trafficking, rape, image-based sexual abuse, racist, and nonconsensual material.”
Related: Pornhub Execs Face Allegations of ‘Monetizing Rape, Child Abuse, and Trafficked Content’
This decision to continue to promote and profit off of illegal material has real life consequences on those who consume it. While any consumption of pornographic material has extremely negative effects, those who consume this illegal content also face repercussions from the law. Roughly 850 men are arrested in the UK every month for online child abuse offenses, and more than 50% of them were first introduced to the content through pornography websites, while not explicitly seeking it out.
“The police never found a single search for images of children: it was all from clicking through links — what the algorithms were offering me,” one offender told The Guardian. “Porn sites have a button that says ‘See more like this.’ I was desensitised, I had looked at so much teen porn.”
While pornography websites continue to operate and flourish, it is clear that they only care about profit and will do whatever it takes to hook more users on their poison. While lawmakers have been enacting new laws to limit their reach and protect children from them, they ultimately need to be held accountable for they evil they are spreading.
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