Pornography, including child pornography, runs rampant online.
The industry is facing a reckoning from an unlikely suspect: a young woman whose life spiraled out of control when, at age 13, her boyfriend posted an explicit video of her on Pornhub without her knowledge or consent. Eight years later, a federal judge in California has denied Visa’s motion to dismiss Serena Fleites’s lawsuit, which alleges the credit card company enabled child pornography like hers on Pornhub via the pornography website’s parent company, MindGeek.
Judge Cormac Carney, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote an order that sheds light on just how debased and exploitative the pornography industry is to women and children. According to a 2020 report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the “insatiable demand” for child pornography saw 8.4 million videos posted online in 2018. Visa took some responsibility for this, originally, after a December 2020 story in the New York Times, “The Children of Pornhub,” told Fleites’s story. At that time, per the order, Visa took temporary action and suspended business with MindGeek. MindGeek, which runs Pornhub, also took action and “took down over 10 million unverified videos from its [sites], constituting over 80% of its content.” It was short-lived, however, and eventually, Visa restored its services and continued processing payments for MindGeek and Pornhub.
A key point in the order demonstrating the toxic situation between the young girl, MindGeek, and Visa:
“The emotional trauma that Plaintiff suffered flows directly from MindGeek’s monetization of her videos and the steps that MindGeek took to maximize that monetization. If not for its drive to maximize profit, why would MindGeek allow Plaintiff’s first video to be posted despite its title clearly indicating Plaintiff was well below 18 years old? Why would MindGeek stall before removing the video, which Plaintiff alleges had advertisements running alongside it? Why would MindGeek take the video and upload it to its other porn websites? Why, after being alerted by Plaintiff that the video was child porn, would it allow the video to be reuploaded, whereafter advertisements were again featured alongside the reuploaded videos? And why did Plaintiff have to fight for years to have her videos removed from MindGeek’s sites? Plaintiff claims that MindGeek did these things for money, and Visa knowingly offered up its payment network so that MindGeek could satisfy that goal.”
This indicates that Visa knew or should have known that MindGeek and Pornhub were profiting from the business of facilitating child pornography online and ignored it, choosing to profit themselves over having a sliver of moral obligation to innocent children. Not only that, but Visa chose to do business with MindGeek and Pornhub, sites that didn’t just passively allow the proliferation of child pornography but solicited, stored, distributed, and re-uploaded it, refining the algorithms of the videos so that it was nearly impossible to remove explicit videos of the exploitation of children and thus increasing their profit margin.
The lawsuit raises an important question in the internet era: Do private corporations have a moral responsibility not to support companies doing illegal business? You don’t have to be a parent to understand how devastating Pornhub’s decision was to Serena Fleites’s life. The proliferation of online pornography is unique in its scope and reach: It exploits women, abuses finances, and lures the mind into addiction.
But knowing these things has never been enough to halt the existence of online pornography. The only thing that may begin to curb the industry a little is to force it to face a financial reckoning. Maybe this is a start.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She is an opinion columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
