Front Burner - The problems with Pornhub

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

Pornhub, the Montreal-based streaming giant, is in trouble. They’ve dumped millions of videos from their platform, Visa and Mastercard have cut ties with the company, and they’re facing questions from Canadian MPs. This all happened after a recent New York Times article which exposed the platform’s insidious problem of hosting videos of rape, child abuse and sex trafficking — sometimes even after victims asked for the videos to be taken down. But porn performers say that while they also want to fight abuse and non-consensual content on the platform, they’re now becoming collateral damage in the rush to tackle this serious issue — and that could affect their livelihoods and their safety. Today, we’re speaking to Melissa Gira Grant, a staff writer at The New Republic and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, about the changes shaking one of the world’s biggest porn sites, and why sex workers say they need to be included in the conversation.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Pornhub is in trouble. Just yesterday, the Montreal-based company said it dumped millions of videos from its platform. Visa and MasterCard have cut ties, and Canadian MPs have called on Pornhub executives to testify before a federal committee.

This was all sparked by a New York Times story called The Children of Pornhub, written by longtime journalist Nicholas Kristof. The story exposed a stomach-turning phenomenon, Pornhub hosting videos of child exploitation, sex trafficking, and rape. videos of child exploitation, sex trafficking, and rape. These videos were uploaded directly to the site, and they sometimes stayed there, despite victims asking them to be removed. Today, a look at the massive shifts rocking the world's most popular porn site, why porn performers say they've been talking about these problems for years, and why they worry about becoming collateral damage in the rush to tackle this very serious issue. This is Frontburner. All right, so my guest today is Melissa Jira Grant. She's a staff writer at The New Republic

and the author of Playing the Whore, the work of sex work. And she just wrote a feature about this for The New Republic. Hi, Melissa. Thank you so much for making the time today. Hey, thanks for having me. So for those unfamiliar with Pornhub, it's kind of like a YouTube type site, one of the most popular websites in the world, actually. And at least until recently, it focused very heavily on user-generated content where basically anyone could upload videos, whether or not they own them or had consent to share them. And there's also a paid subscriber service within the website. So I want to start by talking with you today about the changes that this company, the Pornhub,

brought in this week and last week. And can you tell me what these changes are and how significant they are? Sure. So Pornhub, like you were saying prior to this week, was really reliant essentially on other people's content to make money, right? Not necessarily just user-generated content in the way people might think about it, you know, like making a lip sync video and posting it online, but actually like other people's content that they go into the world to make money off of being pirated, right? So like imagine, right? So like,

imagine, I don't know that you could sign up for a website where you could watch pirated Marvel content, but somehow Marvel gets the money now, right? It's a really convoluted way of dealing with something that's that's core of their business model, which is, is putting content on the website non consensually. This is something people were angry about for a really long time, you know, not least of which porn performers, but also people who had content made of them non-consensually. So one of the things that Pornhub did in reaction to, not their demands, but to a story by Nick Kristof, was to disable downloading of videos

and to require users to become verified in order to upload videos. So theoretically, that would help both people who had any abuse material posted to the site and also people whose material was being pirated and posted to the site. Then a few days later, it was like another shoe dropped, and Visa and MasterCard stopped doing business with Pornhub. So that essentially means that if you want to actually pay for your porn, which is also part of how performers get paid, Pornhub will no longer accept those credit cards and you have to use an alternative. Right. It leads to this sense of like no one knows what's going to happen next. And then a couple days later, Pornhub started removing unverified content. So things that had been uploaded, you know, before they made that change.

And that as of right now is about 10 and a half million videos. Right. You know, you mentioned that this is something that porn performers have been asking for for a long time, of course, because it helps with this, you know, incredibly insidious and awful problem of sexual abuse, rape and other horrifying acts that really have ended up on Pornhub. But like you said, also, this issue of content being pirated, you know, our producer Ali Jane spoke to a performer named Ali Eve Knox. And, you know, she basically said the exact same thing. No one cares about keeping sex workers in the loop here. Because moralistically, you know, we're the problem. They don't see us as trying to hold Pornhub to these standards that

we have a long time ago. You know, we didn't want child porn. We don't want revenge porn. We don't want any of that. We want everyone to make sure that they have their paperwork to make sure everything is legal. Like we're very into this. We have solutions. But I do know that in this suite of changes that you just mentioned, the ones around MasterCard and Visa essentially suspending their services to these sites. These haven't been welcomed by performers. And can you talk to me a little bit about why? Sure.

I mean, you have to kind of understand how Pornhub sits in the larger porn industry, which is that it is essentially due to their relationship with this much larger company, MindGeek, and the porn production studios that MindGeek also owns, you're basically dealing with a monopoly here. So the same corporate interests are producing the porn that ends up on the website. And then if porn performers want to make money off video that was otherwise pirated to the website, they have to become verified users. It's a complete mess. And it's something that, you know, is probably ripe for antitrust investigation, to be honest. What ended up happening is after the New York Times story, after public outcry, Visa and MasterCard initiated these changes themselves,

not Pornhub. And they said they're not going to do business anymore with Pornhub. So you can't use a Visa or MasterCard to purchase a membership for Pornhub. The reason performers are so alarmed by this, this is something that's been happening for a long time. I mean, going back at least 20 years, porn performers and credit card companies have been in this kind of cat and mouse stance of like credit card companies like always changing the rules on like what kind of porn they produce, like lists of terms that you can't use or scenes that you can't make. So none of this was surprising that like credit card companies would get into this and and you know sort of be a way that Pornhub was going to be punished essentially but

it ended up punishing sex workers right it ends up punishing people who rely on Pornhub for their income if Pornhub was just a small site with a lot of other competition and we existed in the internet of 10 years ago where porn performers could make a living producing their own content, putting it on their own websites, marketing it to their own customers, this wouldn't necessarily be such a big deal. that has a stranglehold over the industry, and then becomes the focus of public outcry, that this can happen almost overnight. And those are the people who are going to be facing the pain on the bottom line here, right? Those are the people who are going to be going home with less money in a matter of weeks, not the people who run the site necessarily. And I want to talk about what that looks like practically, because we spoke to another performer, Mary Moody, who's a very successful award-winning performer and she said so I sell videos and now no one can purchase those I'm still going to get ad revenue for the

free videos I upload on Pornhub so I'll make maybe $300 this month from Pornhub where last month I made $12,000. So it's a real hit to her but she actually said it's not her that she's worried about she's she has savings but she's much more worried about the majority of performers who don't have a lot of money or power to start with. I think what people don't realize is a lot of sex workers are regular people. A lot of us are women of color, trans people. A lot of us have families. We're mothers. We're regular people.

And the majority of sex workers are living off of maybe like minimum wage income. And a lot of them relied solely on Pornhub for that income. So during a pandemic and right before the holidays, Visa and MasterCard suspending services to Pornhub is simply taking away an income source from an already marginalized group. And so for lower income performers on Pornhub, how significant is this change? We're also living in the midst of a pandemic, right? So there is a whole group of people who may have never made porn before, who don't necessarily have the audience base that these successful longstanding performers have, who might not have other diversified sources of income from other kinds of porn businesses or ads. And those are

the people who are most abandoned by this. I mean, if your goal here is to create a website where consenting adults can look at porn and the people in it consented to be there and there was no exploitation and there was no abuse. Now you're putting performers in a situation where they might be making content that they never otherwise would have made. Now you're putting porn performers in a situation where they're making less money for doing the same work and either they're going to have to do different work or more of that work. Like you are creating a situation that's actually right for exploitation and abuse by doing this. So it's not just economic.

This is actually like a labor rights issue for those performers. Because it's not like if you stop paying us, we're just going to go and get office jobs or become teachers because we can't do that. You know, we've already been painted as this. A lot of us don't have skills and other things. So it's going to be real problematic because we what are we going to do? Go to the streets? And it's not like people's sexual urges are just going to go away if they can't get this type of content. They're going to go underground and it's going to be a lot harder to track. It's going to be a real mess.

So, you know, what I'm hearing from you is that people in this industry for a long time have been shouting that child exploitation videos, non-consensual content is a real problem on a site like Pornhub. So is also pirated videos that they make consensually. that they make consensually. And so some of what Pornhub has done here is welcome something that they want, removing unverified content, stopping the ability to download content. But, you know, what's happening with Visa and MasterCard, this could really put people in a precarious situation. This is basically a very real and unintended consequence here, though I imagine there are people who don't feel like this is an unintended consequence, like they want it all shut down, right? They would be happy to not have a Pornhub at all. This is the problem with the New York Times article, and this is the problem with this campaign that, you know, the article grew out of, yet really minimizes its role in in focusing public outcry on Pornhub. So there's a Christian

ministry that spawned an anti-trafficking organization about a decade ago. That organization in the last year or two has decided that they're going to really focus on porn. And that's where this you know petition that listeners may have seen or come across had two million signatories, according to the people who maintain the petition, which is this group. They're the people who shared stories with Nicholas Kristof and taken credit for it. That group is called Exodus Cry. What we have seen transpire in the last 50, 60, 70 years is the pornification of our society,

the development of a society that casts men and women into these roles and a society that has utterly desacralized sex stripped it of all meaning and the woman who is in charge of this porn hub anti-porn hub campaign um christophe did actually mention her in the piece her name is layla mickwhite. And we are going to keep this pressure on until we accomplish the goal of shutting down Pornhub and in holding its executives accountable and in implementing legislation that would prevent this from happening in the future. But he didn't mention that this was part of a larger effort by this group, not just to attack non-consent, not just to attack a violence or abuse, but to attack all porn, to attack the entire sex industry. And their reason for doing that has nothing to do with

the health and safety of the people in that industry. Their reason for doing that is because they are part of, you know, a pretty old Christian right project that uses issues of sexual purity in order to build power for themselves. For them, this is a holy war. And so the solutions that are going to come out of it are not solutions that are necessarily going to improve the lives of people who are performing in porn. They're not even necessarily going to help people

whose images are ending up on Pornhub without their consent, including images of rape and sexual abuse. You know, essentially what you're doing is just pushing that to the farther reaches of the Internet. Nicholas Kristof wrote the piece and joins me now. There was a video that I saw of a Indonesian junior high school girl, a video of a Chinese woman being tortured. I have a lot of respect for Canada's efforts to promote global women's rights,

and this is not consonant with those values. This is an issue for all Canadians to wrestle with. What kind of international companies do they wish to host? In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years.

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I want to zoom out here for a minute and talk about, you know, you mentioned Pornhub. The site is a monopoly. The company that owns it is this Montreal-based tech giant MindGeek. And can you tell me just a little bit about MindGeek and how big they actually are? Because we're not just talking about Pornhub here, right? No, the thing about a company like MindGeek that has, you know, raised concerns among porn performers for some time, is that not only do they own the distribution, right, not only do they own the movie theaters, but they also own some of the means of production,

the studios themselves. When this was how Hollywood worked in the 30s, like Congress stepped in and broke this up on an antitrust grounds. What it means is that you're essentially, you know, self dealing. And that's a real problem for the workers themselves, because they've lost a lot of power. The more powerful, the bigger that MindGeek gets, the less power performers have. And, you know, given what a big player MindGeek is in the industry, the Visa and MasterCard story, you know, if they don't reinstate their services on Pornhub, what are the possible knock-on effects in other parts of the industry? I know Ali Eve Knox said that even though she doesn't work with Pornhub, she's still worried this will end up affecting her. This is what sex workers have been crying about since before I started in this industry, which is the war on porn. People are trying to take it down. I think this is really just fueling their fire. Now that they've made, you know, this is a big win for them now that

they've taken down payment transactions and porn, they're just going to go for other sites is what I'm afraid of. You know, none of these campaigns have never just been isolated to one website. People might remember several years ago, a website called Backpage, where sex workers could advertise, also was targeted in a similar campaign by some of the same organizations, actually. And Nick Kristof was also part of publicizing the anti-Backpage campaign. I went on a walk in midtown Manhattan the other day with a young woman who used to work these streets. She was sold for sex by a succession of pimps while she was still a minor. You're going to see a whole bunch of pimps recruiting girls. And if you listen to their pitch, their pitch is that you don't have to walk outside anymore. I can do it so that you just stay in a hotel.

And you know how this is possible? Because websites like Backpage. And it was the same story Backpage is complicit allegedly in sex trafficking because ads were placed on the website that at the other end of that ad was a victim of sex trafficking and so it was an attempt to hold the website accountable for the crime that took place to that victim and they were also successful in getting Visa and Mastercardard to stop doing business with Backpage. It got to the point where you had to, you know, buy an ad with like Bitcoin or a gift card or something. I mean, you're already dealing with a stigmatized workforce and now you're pushing people to like, you know, it's basically impossible to do business like any other business

person if you're in this industry. And was before right that was before visa and mastercard pulled um their business relationship from pornhub so everyone rightfully so is concerned that this is going to not stop with pornhub that you know a website like only fans for example might be the next target that even things like sex workers crowdfunding campaigns could be a target, because they have been in the past, you know, they have been situations where sites like WePay or GoFundMe have denied sex workers ability to use those platforms like anyone else, even if they weren't using it for porn. Because anything a sex worker does online is sort of seen to be a terms of service violation. So I don't believe that this is going to stop with Pornhub either.

Right. And so you mentioned Backpage and how Visa and MasterCard pulled their services from this site as well, this classified website that was often used by sex workers to solicit services and also accused of hosting child sex trafficking ads. And similarly to what's going on with Pornhub right now, there was this very vocal outcry, US authorities did shut it down in 2018. And am I right to say that then a lot of sex workers were forced into a more dangerous form of sex

work, like they had to go to the streets? I mean, Backpage wasn't unique in this. Before Backpage, there was Craigslist. Before Craigslist, there were lots of, you know, websites where sex workers could advertise. But this was pretty common to the industry. You know, for the last 15 years, if you were a sex worker, you didn't need to rely on someone else. If you can put your own ads online, then you can choose who you want to see. You can set the terms of what that exchange is going to look like. And you also have control over your images, you have control over how you're talked about, like, you are losing all of that, when these websites go down.

And as a result, you know, people still have to eat, they still have to pay rent. And so they are forced into situations where they're reliant on other people to have more control over their work. And it's that that can lead to more violence and exploitation. So essentially, the whole thing was supposed to be about fighting trafficking, but it actually produced some trafficking situations for sex workers that they had not previously been in, where they were reliant on people to survive. And that just wasn't the case before when they had a website. It sounds really silly, right? It's just a website, but it made the difference between someone's independence and survival and having to put that in the hands of someone else who might be a really bad actor. And so what would porn performers, sex workers like to see happen here in this, you know, very heated discussion that's happening

right now around Pornhub and MindGeek? The fundamental thing that I'm hearing from porn performers and other sex workers about this whole Pornhub blow up is that they would like to have been listened to in the first place. That they would have liked to have been consulted in making these changes, that they would have been considered valuable. And right, this is something that we heard quite a few times from Ali Ebenox and Mary Moody as well. To not include us in the things that are going to affect us is just absolutely insane, very, very, very unsafe for us.

It is very hard to get lawmakers to speak to us as sex workers. A lot of them really don't know anything about this industry. I've previously talked to assembly people in California and had them ask me the most basic questions like, oh, so you're a webcam model. Can you tell me what that is? And I'm like, you're currently writing legislation about webcam models. I mean, let's be honest, Pornhub would have no value if it weren't for their work. And not only Pornhub, but also Nick Kristoff and these anti-porn campaigns, none of them are putting those voices at the fore. None of them are listening to their concerns. Maybe it's because it would require acknowledging that they actually do have some shared fate.

But I don't think it's only that. I mean, personally, what I want is for people to understand that you can fight violence and exploitation alongside of porn performers. You don't have to, you know, follow the campaigns of organizations like Exodus Cry or follow the work of somebody like Nicholas Kristof, who absolutely are pushing an agenda that is more rooted in the ideology of, you know, ending porn. is more rooted in the ideology of, you know, ending porn. I don't know necessarily that Kristoff wants to end porn, but let's put it this way. He wasn't shy about giving his platform to people who do. And the demands for Visa and MasterCard to get out of business with Pornhub were the demands of that Christian right group. I think that we're kind of buying into this false dichotomy here that like, either you want to clean up Pornhub or you support sex workers and you could do both at the same time and in fact the way that Pornhub was working wasn't working for porn performers and they would like to have had a say in how that business was run. Melissa

thank you so much for this conversation um it was really really fascinating and and um brought up a lot of points that I hadn't necessarily thought about until now. So thank you so much. Thank you. All right. So before we leave you today, we reached out to Nicholas Kristof from the New York Times for comment. And he said, quote, as I repeatedly argued in my articles, the issue is not porn, but the rape of children. I have no problem with websites that feature consenting adults.

He added, quote, children are much less likely to have their lives destroyed. And that's what this is about. We also reached out to Lila McElwain, the founder of Exodus Cries Trafficking Hub Movement, which aims to shut down Pornhub. And we asked her about Melissa's concern that their advocacy to shut down the website could push sex workers towards unsafe work. And she didn't directly address that concern, but she said, quote, Today, it appears even Pornhub has recognized that the trafficking hub movement has been successful. But this is not the end by any means. Real justice for the countless victims of Pornhub means public apologies, financial restitution, and criminal prosecutions to shut down Pornhub and put its executives behind bars for knowingly distributing, advertising,

and profiting from child pornography. That's all for today. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.