More than 400,000 sign petition to shut Pornhub down for allegedly profiting off rape and sex assault videos

More than 400,000 people have signed an online petition accusing sex site Pornhub of profiting off videos of sexual abuse and rape.

“Several shocking cases of sex trafficking and child rape films” hosted on the world’s biggest pornography site over the past few months have prompted aChange.org campaign to shut the site down and “hold its executives accountable for aiding trafficking,” the petition says.From a 15-year-old girl whose mother located her after learning that pornographic videos of her daughter were posted on the site, to the 22 women who were “deceived and coerced” by the owner of ancillary site GirlsDoPorn into performing sex acts that were later uploaded, Pornhub is nothing short of a criminal enterprise, the petition organizers allege.

Pornhub said it received 42 billion visits in 2019, 8.5 billion higher than the preview year, and with 1,200 searches per second, according to The Independent.Exodus Cry, the petition’s sponsor, claims that Pornhub does not police its own offerings nearly enough, and profits off that lack of oversight. Pornhub’s owner, Mindgeek, defended its actions and practices.

“Pornhub has a steadfast commitment to eradicating and fighting non-consensual content and under-age material,” Mindgeek told The Guardian. “Any suggestion otherwise is categorically and factually inaccurate.”

But in the past two months alone, according to separate reports onBBC News, a now 25-year-old who struggled for years to have her rape believed (it was at knifepoint, and she was badly beaten), and a woman whose sister found her image in revenge porn online both had trouble getting Pornhub to respond to their allegations and remove the images, which were posted without their consent.