Pornhub Parent Co, Aylo Holdings Fined For Profiting From Sex Trafficking Videos

Following a 2019 federal grand jury indictment of GirlsDoPorn(GDP), in the Southern District of California, for sex trafficking, among other charges, Pornhub's parent company Aylo Holdings(fka MindGeek) will pay $1.8 million to the U.S. government to resolve a charge of profiting off of sex trafficking. A probe by the Eastern District of New York’s Attorney’s Office found that GDP has been posting videos on Pornhub and other Aylo websites since 2009.

Aylo will enter a deferred prosecution agreement, which means that a monitor will be appointed to oversee the company and its compliance efforts for three years.

According to court documents filed by Aylo this week, the company profited off of GDP’s content. The authorities wrote in a press release that Aylo “knew or should have known” that it was hosting videos wherein many women did not know they were being filmed, or didn’t know that these videos would be shared with the masses. Many of these women had submitted complaints to Aylo between 2016 and 2019, which states that the videos were posted without their consent. But it wasn’t until several months after GDP was found guilty of sex trafficking that the network’s videos were removed from Pornhub and other Aylo sites.

“This resolution will not only provide oversight over one of the largest online content distributors in the world and ensure the company’s lawful behavior, but it will also develop industry-wide standards for safety and compliance,” said U.S. Attorney Breon Pearce in a statement.

Pornhub and porn content sites owned by Aylo have come under fire for a history of negligence in moderating third-party uploads of adult content. Victims of sex trafficking are portrayed in these adult videos against their will, or even without their knowledge.

A number of states in America, including Mississippi, Virginia and Utah have imposed requirements for adult websites to conduct age verification checks in order to grant users access. When one of these measures first went into effect in Louisiana, Pornhub required visitors to verify their age with the LA Wallet app, a digital wallet for Louisiana state driver licenses. But once these laws expanded to other states, the porn outlet chose to block access in those places entirely.

“Since [adding age verification], our traffic in Louisiana dropped approximately 80 percent,” Pornhub wrote in a statement. “Those people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to other corners of the internet that don’t verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content.”

Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos were earlier this week, added to a list of platforms subject to the regulations under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Among other safety measures, the act requires platforms to comply with certain child protection provisions. Once the EU’s code of conduct for age-appropriate design is finalized, this could mean that these platforms have to enact hard age checks. That means that users would have to verify their age and identity by official means (not just checking a box that says you’re an adult).

Aylo Holdings(fka MindGeek) has been the target of many conservative groups fighting against child sexual exploitation on the internet. The owners have been accused of deliberately spreading degenerate and offensive sexual content to children and the society at large.