According to the Christian Post, there is a growing movement of Christian anti-pornography activists who want to see the pornography website PornHub shut down.
Terry Crews, the Christian actor and host of primetime programs including “America’s Got Talent” and “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” has denounced the website Pornhub.
A grassroots effort has been launched to shut down the global pornography website Pornhub amid allegations that its profiting off the trafficking of underage girls who are forced to perform sex acts in videos.
a short message posted to his Twitter account on Tuesday, Crews stated his opposition to the widely visited porn website, parodying the radical call to “defund the police.”
“DEFUND PORNHUB,” tweeted Crews, getting as of Thursday morning over 68,000 likes and more than 14,000 retweets and comments.
Crews also tagged the group Fight the New Drug in his tweet. The organization describes itself as a “Non-religious, non-legislative, research-based nonprofit raising awareness on the harmful effects of porn & exploitation.”
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, another anti-pornography group, commended Crews for his open statement of support for the movement to shut down Pornhub.
“It takes courage to publicly state that there are major problems with the largest pornography website’s existence, and we commend Terry Crews for using his influence to call on Pornhub to be defunded,” said NCOSE Executive Director Dawn Hawkins in a statement on Wednesday.
“Pornhub — which requires no legitimate forms of age-verification from users who are uploading content — ultimately is fueling demand for sexual abuse material and putting lives at great risk. It is past time to shut down Pornhub.”
In 2016, Crews posted a video to Facebook acknowledging a past addiction to pornography and explained that it resulted in the end of his marriage to Rebecca King Crews.
“It changes the way you think about people. People become objects,” Crews said in the 2016 video. “It affected everything. I didn’t tell my wife … didn’t tell my friends. Nobody knew, but the internet allowed that little secret to just stay and grow. It was something that my wife was literally like, ‘I don’t know you anymore. I’m out of here.’”
Crews’ tweet comes as an online petition launched by Laila Mickelwait of Exodus Cry that’s calling for Pornhub to be shut down has garnered more than 1.5 million signatories.
“Pornhub, the world’s largest and most popular porn site, has been repeatedly caught enabling, hosting, and profiting from videos of child rape, sex trafficking, and other forms of non-consensual content exploiting women and minors,” the petition states.
“We’re calling for Pornhub to be shut down and its executives held accountable for these crimes.”
The petition cites multiple examples of Pornhub allegedly being connected to sex trafficking, including the posting of videos of an abducted minor being sexually assaulted.
“A 15-year-old girl who had been missing for a year was finally found after her mother was tipped off that her daughter was being featured in videos on the site — 58 such videos of her rape and sexual abuse were discovered on Pornhub,” continued the petition.
“Her trafficker, who was seen in the videos raping the child, was identified using surveillance footage of him at a 7-Eleven where he was spotted with his victim. He is now facing a felony charge.” (source)
This is a noble cause done with good intentions, and if it is able to be followed through on, it will bring some good results. But honestly, I am tired of hearing about “stopping PornHub” because, from my experience in researching trends involving society- especially the human trafficking issue, which is at the heart of the main complaint raised by Christian groups -it is an easy target but how effective one would be in tacking this particular one is very questionable, in particular when one considers time and resources invested into such a cause.
I have covered the history of PornHub before in my discussions about the funding of 4Chan. I recommend you read the full article here so to understand the back history of the website. But to summarize, it was created by a German man named Fabian Thylmann, who after making his money sold it to a group of five Canadians who have owned it ever since.
Contrary to what is stated in the article, and what PornHub’s claims may be, it is not the largest adult website in the world. In fact, according to Alexa.com (safe link), it does not even make the top fifty adult websites, with those places being held by Xvideos and Xnxx, and Youporn at the first, second, and fourth places. The third and fifth places are held by the “cam” websites Chaturbate and LiveJasmin, at the third and fifth places.
This is not to say the site is small. PornHub is big in the US, popular, advertises a lot, it may be very showy in how it advertises its ill-gotten wares, but it’s NOT the largest of such websites- this is simply a factually incorrect statement -and by a long shot. Thus to attack PornHub is to attack a sliver of the problem while not even touching on the larger parts of the current Internet porn problem. One might think of such an approach as dealing with a minor symptom of a larger issue- treating symptoms is important, but it is better to prefer dealing with the disease itself, or something as close to it as one can get. If one was serious about dealing with the problem, one would want- one would think -to go after one of the three big players mentioned above if one wants to be most effective, or at least one of the sites on the top fifty.
Now almost all of these websites are “user run” in that people upload their personal videos onto them. Think about it- if these websites allow free upload of content, and underage pornographic material has been uploaded onto PornHub, do you really think that these other porn sites are “cleaner”? Absolutely not, and in fact they are far, far worse, for PornHub was thankfully caught, but other sites actively aggregate not only the same kinds of material, but they also have even darker secrets.
Take for example, XVideos. Under the legal reporting requirements to operate in the USA under the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act (also known as 2257 notice), it reveals that the website is based in Czechia, a country that is mostly atheist and historically is a crossing ground between east and west in Europe, Slavic by language and ethnicity but Germanic by history and culture. It is not just Xvideos, but many, many pornographic websites set up business in Czechia because (a) the government does not enforce any laws against porn and more importantly, (b) Czechia is a US State Department recognized hub of sex trafficking of women from all parts of Europe, usually “sourcing” them by force, deception, or imprisoning prostitutes against their consent and forcing them to work in the sex industry, filming the acts, before sending them on to do more forced work in the brothels of Germany and the Netherlands.
On July 17th, 2020, Czech police raided a well-known porn producer, Czech Castings, and jailed six people on charges of human trafficking after they were found to have lured arguably hundreds of women from all over Eastern Europe with promises of a job in modeling when instead they were intimidated, pressured, or directly forced to participate in pornography.
Detectives from the National Center against Organized Crime have uncovered a group of people who have been attracting women to professional modeling photography since 2013, but in reality it was pornography. They then put it on the internet under the name Czech casting. They accused nine people of human trafficking, sexual coercion and rape, a spokesman for the unit, Jaroslav Ibehej, told police on Friday. Six of them are in custody.
“From 2013, job offers presented as professional modeling photography for women over the age of 18 with a promise of earnings ranging from one to five thousand crowns were to be advertised. However, according to our conclusions, this should have been just a fictional pretext and a cover for the production and distribution of pornographic images, ” Ibehej informed on the website .
It was a group led and financed by the owner of the company. According to the police, he decided on the suitability of the candidates for inclusion in “their project”.
“After his positive opinion, the other members had to follow a predetermined procedure on how to manipulate girls in order to shoot a pornographic work. The financial profit of the members of the group of people should have depended on what erotic scenes the girls managed to get or force, “Ibehej described.
The group was well organized, everyone had a role to play. “These included transporting women to the casting site, concluding written contracts for the performance of artistic performance, verifying the age of majority of applicants, conducting personal interviews, removing possible barriers, persuading, persuading and forcing women to engage in various sexual practices, often involving themselves.” spokesman.
The videos, as Czech casting, were published by the group in abbreviated form on the Internet, which, according to the police, harmed a number of women. They were exposed to problems at work and personal level. “Many have experienced mental and health problems with the need to seek medical help, including a longer period of treatment,” Ibehej said, adding that several hundred women had taken part in the casting.
According to the Seznam Zprávy server , this is the company Netlook, which is the largest producer of pornography in the Czech Republic and is based in Prague’s Vokovice. The owner of the company, Martin Stiborek, is to be blamed.
The main defendant’s lawyer, David Bascheri, denies that anyone is manipulating women. “They did everything voluntarily,” he said, noting that they later realized what they would look like in front of their surroundings. “So they changed their minds and turned to the police.”
Forensic scientists detained ten people as part of an event called LENS and performed a total of 14 searches of houses and other premises and land. They mainly provided computers and other equipment, documents and other materials.
The National Center against Organized Crime then charged nine people. On July 15, 2020, the District Court for Prague 10 sent six of them into custody, (source)
Now there is something to be said about women who make bad decisions and then regret them later and try to use the law as a way to cover for their shame, or make accusations when it was their own fault. An infamous example of this was when the married Scottie Nell Hughes of then Fox News had a consensual affair with Charles Payne, a black and married man, and tried to then say that he sexually assaulted her, and Payne was eventually exonerated. However true or not true this example may apply in this particular case with Czech Castings, the fact is that something very suspicious was going on that needs to be investigated, and given the history of Czechia with human trafficking, one would think that people serious about “stopping porn” would demand more action against foreign websites- as that is what both Xvideos and Czech Castings are -to either be stopped or be blocked in the US. However, instead, people are passing their time focusing on a website that does not even make the top fifty largest adult sites on the Internet because of popularity from ads.
But this is just the beginning, for the problem of child sexual abuse and trafficking goes even deeper, but can be found in the third item on that list- Chaturbate -which is a whole another ball of controversy that makes PornHub look like a walk in the park.
Chaturbate has an option that exists if one signs up where one can see “age unverified models” if one chooses to. Basically, they are women who claim to be at least 18, but nobody knows if they really are because their age has not been confirmed. Most of these women are foreign, but some are also from the US. Anybody who spends time on 4Chan on either Politically Incorrect (/pol/), Random (/b/), or Fitness (/fit/), knows this because one will inevitably see at some point a series of spammed messages (that are usually reported and deleted by moderators quickly) which say this exact same thing, and they say that doing such is the best way to see- you guessed it -underage women on live camera engaging in pay-per-action sexual activity.
I cannot say the same about LiveJasmin, although rumors exist on messageboards from various reports that human trafficking or forced camming takes places on that platform as well. This makes sense, for while there are many people on both websites who use them for their legal purposes (I am not saying that any of this is morally right), there is a very shady side that exists and needs to be investigated.
I want to be very clear that do NOT support PornHub at all. The site is accurately described as a cancer on the souls, minds, and bodies of the whole world, but “defunding PornHub” is largely a waste of time meant to make people feel good about something while having no real effect, as it is investing a lot of effort into taking down one entity that if taken down in questionable not only how effective it would be in actually stopping child sexual abuse, but does not deal with other websites with larger amounts of nefarious material that are much more popular, and is an imbalanced investment of time and resources.
Now some will ask, “what should then be proposed to stop this?”
I don’t say that PornHub should not be out of business. Rather, that one wants to invest one’s resources in the most effective way possible for the best likely outcome.
Do you want to seriously stop pornography? Aside from the obvious (stop watching, which deprives the producers of the attention, advertisement revenue, and prevents the psychological manipulation inherent to the consumption of such filth), dealing with the engineered breakdown of the family, society, and relations between men and women that historically provide meaning and purpose and allow men to channel their energies to a real person rather than try to manage them under unnatural conditions and instead be forced into a sort of grinding self-cannibalism of the soul that manifests in viewing pornography as a coping mechanism (which is an entire discussion into itself) is the first issue because it is the combination of these toxic behaviors that helped create the current situation.
From an equally important but legal and activism framework- something more aligned to the current activism against PornHub that people are participating in -then there is serious legal work that needs to be done, specifically by overturning all of the damage done by Samuel Roth and the infamous case of Roth vs. USA (1957), which I profiled on Shoebat.com which is the Supreme Court case that created the modern pornography industry. I have yet to hear any serious discussion of doing this.
Likewise, there also needs to be serious work in confronting and pushing for a full-scale federal investigation into the “Free Speech Coalition”, which is a lobbying group for the pornography industry that has been working for years to abolish age of consent laws and legalize child pornography. Indeed, in the past two decades, they have made two major victories-, which are the allowing for cartoon depictions of child pornography in Ashcroft vs. FSC (2002), and a second case for which the FSC is currently in court attempting to say that it is unconstitutional for pornography producers to have to keep records verifying that porn “performers” are indeed over the age of 18, a step that was intentionally added decades ago in order to prevent sex trafficking of minors.
Tell me, where are all of the Christian anti-pornography advocates talking about the Roth case or the FSC? They are far more dangerous than PornHub, because while it is bad that some children were indeed abused and their videos placed on PornHub, it has been the FSC who has actually pushed the society towards legalization of child sexual abuse.
It does not bother me that people want PornHub shut down. It needs to be shut down. However, it cannot be just PornHub. Rather, it needs to be a complete block- a-la a Roskomnadzor style block -on pornographic websites, and a forcible shut down of the American pornography industry that has been responsible for creating so many societal ills for so many people.
Some say that one cannot censor adult content because “free speech”, and while that is an issue that needs to be confronted (part of the whole issue of undoing the effects of the Roth case and the FSC lobby), if one goes on YouTube, there are many videos that one cannot view because they are labeled “Blocked In Your Country”. These are not adult videos, but often normal news broadcasts or shows from any number of countries. If YouTube can block a video or category of videos, then it is not difficult for the US to block the flow of most adult content (assuming there is always some that will seep through) into the US with a few changes to what sites are permitted and what are banned, hence why I referred to Roskomnadzor. If the Chinese and Russians can stop or limit certain content from coming into their countries, the US has far more powerful tools to effect the same ends. The question is not one of ability, but of financial gain and more importantly, the psychological control over the masses, which adult content (as I have noted before) is used as a tool against the common man.
It is for this reason that the focus on PornHub is not going to do anything with any serious change to the current status quo. Rather, it bears not to the same extent, but the typical American type hysteria of hyperfocusing on one thing while ignoring the larger principle or the consequences of one’s actions. This has been seen many times throughout American history, such as with the demands of the various “progressives” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how while they had well-meaning ideas many times, the effects of those ideas was not always either effective or good. In the case of PornHub, it will be to shut down one evil and give people a sense of accomplishment while letting other evils run amok.
I will leave you with the example of Craigslist personals, which was accused of sex trafficking, and indeed it did happen. The same was true with BackPage. Now the personals section for both are gone, but what really happened? Other websites- many others -simply replicated the same format for the US and set up on servers overseas. The US government refuses to block the websites, and people can engage in the same things in the US but now through the protection of a foreign web server. Nothing actually improved, but it just changed the location of where the main computer people were talking through was.
The same is what will happen with PornHub if if is shut down, because people will just migrate to the other websites, which will still be permitted, and the only thing that will change is an increase in advertising revenue to the new influx of traffic from people seeking a pornography drug fix. There may be another website that is targeted, but unless it is one of the “big ones”, and that it involves not merely shutting down a website but using the shutdown of a site to set a precedent for a larger principle of what is acceptable and what is not, then one is giving people a sense of accomplishment without accomplishing much. It is similar to a dog chasing its tail- an act that a dog invests a lot of energy it, but once he achieve his objective, he realizes that he has not accomplished anything of value, when instead the time could have been spent chasing a ball or frisbee.
Ultimately, the problem is a spiritual one, and for what temporal means can be applied, the obsession with PornHub to the detriment of the larger and more serious issues or principles that need to be pursued actively by dedicated people on principle is not helpful to anyone and only hurts the efforts of well-meaning people trying to do something good but are having their energies exhausted focusing on slivers of a pie instead of the whole pie.