Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo Holdings, will pay $1.8 million to the US government To resolve a charge of profiting from sex trafficking. The company, formerly known as MindGeek, will enter into a deferred prosecution agreement, meaning a monitor will be appointed to oversee Aylo and its compliance efforts for three years.
Pornhub and other adult content sites owned by Aylo have been criticized for their history of negligence in moderating third-party uploads of adult content. In the worst cases, this could mean that sex trafficking victims are being filmed in these adult videos against their will, or even without their knowledge.
This special investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York focuses on a network called GirlsDoPorn (GDP), which has been posting videos on Pornhub and other Aylo sites since 2009. By 2019, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of California indicted GDPR accused of sex trafficking, among other charges. But according to Aiello’s court documents, filed this week, Aiello profited from the GDPR’s content. Aiello “knew or should have known” that she was hosting videos where many of the women were not aware they were being filmed, or did not know those videos would be shared with audiences, authorities wrote in a news release. The statement also said that several of these women had filed complaints with Aiello between 2016 and 2019, which stated that the videos were posted without their consent. But the network’s videos were not removed from Pornhub and other Aylo sites until several months after DCD was convicted of sex trafficking.
“This decision will not only provide oversight over one of the world’s largest online content distributors and ensure the company’s lawful conduct, but will also advance industry-wide standards for safety and compliance,” US Attorney Brion Pierce said in a statement.
In 2020, Pornhub foot A number of new features, such as blocking video downloads and requiring user verification to post videos. The platform too I hired a law firmKaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, to conduct an independent review of the company’s content compliance.
The newly renamed Aylo has had a turbulent few years. The company was sold to a brand new private equity firm, strategically named Ethical Capital Partners, and prior to that, MindGeek’s CEO and COO both left the company.
Earlier this week, Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos were added to the list of platforms subject to the strictest regulations under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Among other safety measures, the law requires platforms to adhere to certain child protection provisions. Once the EU Code of Conduct for Age-Friendly Design is finalized, this may mean that these platforms have to enact strict age checks. This means that users will have to verify their age and identity by official means (not just check the box indicating you are an adult).
Already in the United States, a number of states, including Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, and Utah, have imposed requirements on adult websites to perform age verifications in order to grant users access.
When one of these measures first went into effect in Louisiana, Pornhub asked visitors to verify their age using a link LA Wallet appA digital wallet for Louisiana driver’s licenses. But once these laws expanded to other states, Pornhub chose to block access to those places entirely.
“since [adding age verification]“Our traffic in Louisiana is down nearly 80 percent,” Pornhub wrote in a letter statement. “These people haven’t stopped looking for porn. They’ve just migrated to other corners of the internet that don’t verify age, don’t follow the law, don’t take user safety seriously, and which often don’t moderate content.
Privacy advocates She has spoken out against these measures, citing the potential consequences of sharing your government ID in order to use the Internet. Although these measures are intended to protect children, they have the unintended effect of jeopardizing online anonymity. Additionally, it is not entirely uncommon for hackers to break into government databases, and if these verification tools are not secure, this data on who is accessing what types of content on the Internet can easily fall into the wrong hands.
This puts lawmakers in a difficult position. It’s a challenge to push for Internet regulation and safety without creating a whole new series of problems.