Pornhub was hosting videos of minors and trafficking victims — what’s next?

In February 2020, Laila Mickelwait, Exodus Cry’s Director of Abolition at the time, published an op-ed titled, “Time to Shut Pornhub Down,” bringing attention to the fact that Pornhub was hosting child pornography and videos of trafficking victims on the site. This sparked a petition and accompanying campaign, Traffickinghub. Then, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nicholas Kristof, published a scathing exposé in the New York Times, titled, “The Children of Pornhub,” leading the company to leap to action, deleting 80% of their content overnight — about 10 million videos. Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cut ties with the site. In 2021, Canadian parliament began to investigate the Canadian-based company that owns Pornhub, MindGeek and a number of lawsuits were filed against the company on behalf of survivors. NCOSE — the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation — filed several of these lawsuits, representing victims seeking justice against MindGeek. NCOSE was featured in a documentary released on Netflix last money, purporting to address the scandal, called Money Shot.

I spoke to Haley McNamara, Director of the International Centre on Sexual Exploitation in the UK and a Vice President at the U.S. based National Center on Sexual Exploitation, about the situation at Pornhub, the Netflix documentary, and NCOSE’s efforts to stop exploitation in porn.

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