Pornhub infested with child rape videos? Trudeau expresses concern

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was put in a spot of bother on Friday when he was questioned over a column in The New York Times about popular pornographic website Pornhub.

Pornhub, which was launched in 2007 and is hosted in Canada, is among the world's most popular websites. According to its statistics, Pornhub attracts around 3.5 billion visits a month, more than the likes of Netflix, Amazon or Yahoo and gets almost 3 billion advertising impressions daily.

According to SimilarWeb, an internet ranking site, Pornhub is the 10th most popular website in the world, with only one porn website, xvideos.com, ahead of it.

On Friday, The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an damning article alleging Pornhub is "infested with rape videos".

"It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for 'girls under18' (no space) or '14yo' leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are," Kristof wrote.

While Pornhub allows users to upload videos like is done on YouTube, unlike the latter, the porn website allows people to directly download videos from the website. So even if a rape video is removed from Pornhub after receiving an official request, the content may have been downloaded for further dissemination.

Tales of horror

Kristof spoke to a young university student, who was adopted from China by a family in the US. She was allegedly trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in porn videos from the age of nine. These videos regularly appear on Pornhub, the woman told Kristof. She declared, "Pornhub became my trafficker".

Kristof spoke to other people whose videos of them as children have appeared on Pornhub.

'Loose' filters

Kristof explained Pornhub had doubled the number of content moderators in the "last couple of years" and banned searches for words such as “rape,” “preteen,” “pedophilia” and “bestiality”. "... while it is now no longer possible to search on Pornhub in English using terms like 'underage' or 'rape,' the company hasn’t tried hard to eliminate such videos," Kristof alleged in The New York Times.

He cited results for terms such as "r*pe" and "girls with braces", which appear aimed at bypassing restrictions.

"A search for 'r*pe', turns up 1,901 videos. 'Girl with braces' turns up 1,913 videos and suggests also trying 'exxxtra small teens'. A search for '13yo' generates 155,000 videos. To be clear, most aren’t of 13-year-olds, but the fact that they’re promoted with that language seems to reflect an effort to attract paedophiles," Kristof wrote.

Kristof also alleged that while Pornhub was careful with videos of Americans given the risk of litigation, it was more "cavalier" with videos of other nationalities.

Pornhub issued a statement to Kristof in which it said, "any assertion that the company allows child videos on the site 'is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue'”.

Trudeau responds

Kristof questioned Trudeau over the activities of Pornhub. "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada calls himself a feminist and has been proud of his government’s efforts to empower women worldwide. So a question for Trudeau and all Canadians: Why does Canada host a company that inflicts rape videos on the world?"

Trudeau was asked about The New York Times report by a French-speaking reporter in Ottawa on Friday.

In response, Trudeau said, “We are always extremely concerned with gender-based violence, with exploitation of minors, with child pornography. We’re going to continue to work with police agencies and security agencies and all means possible to ensure that all Canadians are kept safe.”