A lawsuit filed by more victims of the sex trafficking operation claims that Pornhub’s moderation staff ignored reports of their abuse videos.


Sixty-one additional women are suing Pornhub’s parent company, claiming that the company failed to take down videos of their abuse as part of the sex trafficking operation Girls Do Porn. They’re suing the company and its sites for sex trafficking, racketeering, conspiracy to commit racketeering, and human trafficking.

The complaint, filed on Tuesday, includes what it claims are internal emails obtained by the plaintiffs, represented by Holm Law Group, between Pornhub moderation staff. The emails allegedly show that Pornhub had only one moderator to review 700,000 potentially abusive videos, and that the company intentionally ignored repeated reports from victims in those videos.

The damages and restitution they seek amounts to more than $311,100,000. They demand a jury trial, and seek damages of $5 million per plaintiff, as well as restitution for all the money Aylo, the new name for Pornhub’s parent company, earned “marketing, selling and exploiting Plaintiffs’ videos in an amount that exceeds one hundred thousand dollars for each plaintiff.”

The plaintiffs are 61 more unnamed “Jane Doe” victims of Girls Do Porn, adding to the 60 that sued Pornhub in 2020 for similar claims.
Girls Do Porn was a federally-convicted sex trafficking ring that coerced young women into filming pornographic videos under the pretense of “modeling” gigs. In some cases, the women were violently abused. The operators told them that the videos would never appear online, so that their home communities wouldn’t find out, but they uploaded the footage to sites like Pornhub, where the videos went viral—and in many instances, destroyed their lives. Girls Do Porn was an official Pornhub content partner, with its videos frequently appearing on the front page, where they gathered millions of views.

read more: https://www.404media.co/girls-do-porn-victims-sue-pornhub-for-300-million/

archive: https://archive.ph/zQWt3#selection-593.0-609.599

      • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Just pictures. Stable diffusion type models have huge problems with flickering right now for videos. No consistency.

          • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            That seems like it would defeat the humane purpose, but maybe. Perhaps use a rough cg as the base layer?

            • Gabu@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              This is the way. For other content it works reasonably well (especially if you properly mask image zones/depth), so I don’t see why 18+ content would be different.

          • jasondj@ttrpg.network
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            1 year ago

            You’ve got it backwards. People take care of themselves because they have self esteem. Depression takes that away.

            Please don’t treat depression like it’s a choice. Nobody chooses to be depressed.

            • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              You can always tell the people who have had good lives, by the utter contempt they casually display for people who struggle.

              Thinking depression is just choosing to lounge around in sweat pants eating cheetos, What a fucking twat.

              • thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev
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                That’s a pretty big assumption, and as with many things in life, repetition and discipline make up 90% of success. You’re never going to start looking at goals as attainable if you’ve resigned yourself to the mentality of “they had a better hand”

                Does self esteem lead to self care or vice versa? Both are true. The only constant is action.

                • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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                  Does self esteem lead to self care or vice versa? Both are true. The only constant is action.

                  Not everyone has the same capability to self heal through action.

                  You are right, that if you are capable of doing that, you should, you shouldn’t just “sit on the sidelines” when it comes to your personal health, but not everyone is built that way.

                  That’s the point that others were trying to get you to understand, that it’s not just a choice one can always act on to self correct.

                  • thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev
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                    1 year ago

                    I think a lot of people think doing good things is supposed to feel good, when in reality it’s more about piercing the veil. Take getting into shape for example, people often exercise for months before seeing any kind of results. In fact, a lot of time, as your body recompositions by adding muscle, you end up gaining weight. You step on the scale expecting to have lost weight and there is no progress, week after week. You have to stick through the “it sucks” part. Then when you start seeing results and health benefits, it helps your self esteem and makes you want to keep going. I worked out for 3-5 times per week for about 3 months before I started seeing results. And it sucked. It’s supposed to.

                    There are no people out there who start doing something difficult and immediately feel reward, purpose, and fulfillment. You’re always going to feel like a moron who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Being successful means you must be very comfortable with failure and be able to reiterate your efforts until you see results.

                    I say this as someone who sits in an engineering position who’s applicants are expected to have 10-15 years of experience as well as a college degree. I’m a 9 year self taught engineer who runs circles around my colleagues. At this point, I’ve failed at more things than most people have even attempted.

    • WhipTheLlama@lemmy.world
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      I can envision a world where the search bar is an AI prompt. What a time to be alive that will be!

      I wonder if we can also browse other peoples’ prompts. That would be cool.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      Why take jobs away from people? There are plenty of porn actors who are not being abused. Why would we want to centralize it all more than it is with an automated “AI” tool?

      • wafflez@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Taking jobs from people and replacing them with automation works towards the utopia we want of having to work less so long as the labor is directly to benefit the people and not the ruling class

        • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          so long as the labor is directly to benefit the people and not the ruling class

          There’s a hell lot riding on that caveat. Personally I’m not as hopeful in that regard.

          • wafflez@lemmy.world
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            We can make it so the labor benefits the workers. I’m just saying it’s not inherently a bad thing to replace jobs with automation, like many default to

        • PurplePropagule@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          That’s the ideal but you know that’s not how it works at all in our current society. Replacing workers with automation just leads to workers needing to find a new job.

          • wafflez@lemmy.world
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            Businesses replacing them yes obviously but that’s not what I’m referring to. We shouldn’t assume automation or loss of jobs are inherently bad, we should strive for worker-benefited automation. Many people don’t even consider it at all but it directly opposes capitalistic systems in a very meaningful way

            • PurplePropagule@sh.itjust.works
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              I know what you mean. You’re talking about an ideal reality. In the real world, people get fucked over when they’re fired, and ai will put a lot of people out of work. Before we can get near what you’re talking about we need widespread labor movements to ensure worker’s rights and to fight for worker-benefited automation among other things. It doesn’t look like we’re close to being there yet, unfortunately. I just don’t see how you can say that automation putting people out of work is moving towards that goal. It just fucks people over because workers have no protection.

      • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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        Ew the other replies to this are so weird. Fuck people really not seeing how having someone like Meta in charge of generating all porn could be a really fucked up thing because it’s better for humans to do nothing at all? Christ that is a bleak fucking idea of a utopia.

        Just because you nerds can’t handle the idea of sex doesn’t mean it should just all be generated.

      • Ragdoll X@lemmy.world
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        AI image generators don’t really lead to centralization - quite the contrary in fact. While there are your DALL-Es and ChatGPTs behind closed doors, there’s also Stable Diffusion and its many variants, along with various open-source Large Language Models and several other projects from hobbyist developers. I’ve seen a lot of people make and post their own AI-generated porn with Stable Diffusion, and some who make money out of it. So while some porn actors/actresses may lose their jobs because of AI, this technology is also creating opportunities for other people.

        And the same can be argued about any kind of automation, so how far should we go with this idea? Should mechanical looms be banned to bring back manual weaving jobs? Should automated filters on social media be removed to create more jobs for content moderators?

        I don’t think AI/automation is the problem. A world where most jobs are automated isn’t a bad thing - a world where money takes precedent over humans and people are punished if they’re out of work (i.e. capitalism) is.

        • thenightisdark@lemmy.world
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          I will say that unlike the horse and buggymakers or the barrel makers or the candlestick makers who have all lost their jobs I do admit…

          None of those are as inherently human as sexuality is.

          Capitalism makes a great cell phone. Capitalism is terrible when it takes precedent over humans and people.

          • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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            My hope is that this will kill off the makeup-crusted dead-eyed fake moan human doll bullshit that is mainstream porn.

            AI can’t fake all the randomness and idiosynchracy of two real people having real sex. Maybe that’s what human porn will coalesce around.

        • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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          Should automated filters on social media be removed to create more jobs for content moderators?

          Maybe not removed but we absolutely need many more people moderating online platforms. We have just so many problems from automated content moderation systems that are caused by the lack of humans reviewing content. Including this very situation, where the site let a lot of sex abuse material in.

          I don’t think AI/automation is the problem. A world where most jobs are automated isn’t a bad thing. A world where money takes precedent over humans and people are punished if they’re out of work - i.e. capitalism - is.

          Yes, but consistently advances in automation come with promises of better lives for people that do not materialize. There have been decades that people talk that we have means to make it so everyone can work less hours a day and less day a week, instead people get fired and we have even less people employed, overworked beyond the limits that worker movements had achieved before.

          Will AI really help people or will it just make it even harder for the people who do willing sex work? Given how twisted this industry is, maybe a little of both, it could turn out to be a net positive, though it’s hard to judge that. But other fields are probably only going to get the hardship.

          Lets be honest, the whole point of automation is to do more work than what it replaces, so it never creates as many jobs as it takes away. Even worse, AI in particular is already primed to replace the same tech, service and artistic jobs that previous forms of automation freed us to engage with. We will not get the same amount of jobs from AI.

          What then? Back to sweatshops, to try to undercut the automation we can’t outperform? We can’t keep at this “oh well, Capitalism still didn’t change ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”.

      • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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        Such a reductive take. Maybe they want porn that isn’t borderline, or questionable. Something where there’s zero potential for abuse. Unless you yourself are privy to the inner workings of each company and the story of each model individually, then you’re running into a risk of stuff not being kosher just by nature of the content.

        Plus, yeah, what about people who are into more extreme things? May as well let them have an outlet for their desires that doesn’t actually have anyone getting raped.

              • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                Gotcha. I think it’s pretty fair to say rape fantasies are “more extreme” than vanilla porn, even if it’s pretty widely sought by both genders. Doesn’t really matter either way past semantics

        • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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          May as well let them have an outlet yeah? Some of us dont want to live on that planet. I dont even want to live on the essential porn planet. As if men need more stimulation. Can the penis not be the center of the universe? Nope? Well fuck off then and take your porn requirement with you. I dont know know why your penis needs are foisted on people like me. Im just searching the internet but i have porn forced on me because of you. Rape porn, child porn, disgusting shit i never want to see but apparemtly its popular with dickbrains. Bugger the lott of you.

          • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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            While I agree that some types of porn are pretty abhorrent, you also can’t just ignore that some people have a deviant nature inherently, and having safe outlets is better than having none.

            You’d do better taking a more moderate stance that might actually change monda than trying to bludgeon an entire population with your vitriol and frankly, sexism. Direct your anger at the people making, not the relatively innocent people just watching.

            • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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              The safe outlet thing is an asumption. Noone will agree with me but at least i can get it off my mind. The rage will never end because there will be no justice. Your relatively innocent people will ensure there is no justice.

              • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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                You know, I’ll give you this much - there’s not much evidence on either side that it is a safe outlet. Until there is, the only metric we can really use is what level of harm is a thing existing , doing? And in the case of AI generated porn of ANY kind, it’s no one. I’ll accept that it may cause long-term societal harm, once I see proof.

                • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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                  Ok, i beleive that the acceptance of rape porn is the same as the acceptance of rape. If you say its cool to get off on raping children in your head then making it real is no big difference. I genuinely dont see the difference, your intention to hurt and pleasure fron causing hurt is no different, your desire is no different .

                  • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
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                    1 year ago

                    So you must also think murder mystery books are horrid crimes? As are horror movies? Lot of murder depicted there. Accepting that is akin to accepting murder itself. Whats the difference? Youre getting off and entertained by murder? Clearly your desire is no different.

          • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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            Porn already is controleld much more than it ever has been in the history of the world.

            Yes “the Victorians” or “the Puritans” took a dim view of erotic material more than we do, but access to materials just needed you to walk to the bad part of town, where you’d engage a (likely trafficked, likely underaged) sex worker.

            I agree that porn can, in some circumstances, under some conditions, to certain demographics, be both a negative thing (and in other ways a positive).

            However, you’re never going to rid the world of horniness without chemically castrating the entire population of the world, and then there might be paraphilias that evolve even if you do.

            So it’s very much a case of what is freedom of speech, literature, art. Is The Birth of Venus porn? Could you make an argument for ancient portraits of babies with their weewee out being child porn? What about crudely drawn murals from antiquity? What about bathroom poetry? What about people having sex on a mountain (you know like we all used to do 100,000 years ago). Is Game of Thrones porn? Is 1984 by George Orwell porn? Is 120 Days of Sodom, which contains a LOT of disgusting sex and child rape, but was written to criticize/expose the aristocracy, not intended to arouse people, porn? What about Chuck Tingle, who writes to satirise porn not truly arouse?

            if all of this stuff is foisted on us by existing should anything be allowed to exist?

            I’m also not saying that porn is inherently good, nor am I saying nothing should be banned, but I am saying you haven’t adequately defined which porn should be banned, and without doing so you end up with a Diagenes’ plucked chicken: behold! a pornographic image!

            • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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              Yeak, bottom line is humans are disgusting vicious and cruel. So porn is a given. Doesnt mean i have to take part. The fact that people like you try you try make humans look good is just embarrassaing.

              • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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                I wouldn’t say my reply is attempting to make humans look wholly, completely good without exception.

                I wouldn’t even say it’s trying to argue pro-pornography. I’m saying that although I am probably more ban-happy than some on this site (I think there should be zero-tolerance for Nazis for instance), I think that rules about banning “material designed to arouse” becomes very quickly “ban anything I don’t like” especially as the Lemmy audience skews white-male, minority voices would effectively be silenced.

                Porn is the first and last bastion of speech, and no conversation about freedom is complete without countenancing it.