March 7, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Amazon, HBO, Comcast, Snapchat, Twitter, and the American Library Association are among the nation’s leading corporations promoting pornography and sexual exploitation, according to the annual “Dirty Dozen” list recent released by NCOSE, a leading organization fighting porn.
NCOSE stands for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. It operated for years under the name “Morality in Media.”
“No corporation or organization should profit from or facilitate sexual exploitation,” NCOSE executive director Dawn Hawkins said. ”The disturbing truth is that many well-established brands, companies, and organizations in America are major perpetrators of sexual harm — whether that be through pornography, prostitution, or sex trafficking.”
Hawkins said Verizon has been removed from the “Dirty Dozen” list because its CEO, Lowell McAdam, is working with NCOSE and said pornography use would switch to “opt-in” (as opposed to opt-out) for its new FiOS-TV customers beginning this year.
“While Verizon continues to profit from the distribution and sale of pornography, we are grateful to see its leadership adopt a positive change,” Hawkins said, explaining why Verizon has been moved to NCOSE's “Watch List.”
The NCOSE Watch List tracks potential contenders for future “Dirty Dozen” lists depending on their follow-through on commitments and next actions, she said.
Comcast Defends Its On-Demand Hard-Core Porn
Meanwhile, companies like Comcast that profit off the pay-per-view sale of hard-core pornography — and defend doing so — remain on the current Dirty Dozen list.
Last May, NCOSE wrote Comcast CED Brian Roberts urging him to stop Comcast’s “ongoing distribution of hardcore pornography via Xfinity television's video-on-demand and premium channel services.” Comcast senior executive vice president David Cohen wrote back in June and said regarding Comcast’s programming of adult videos — including such lewd XXX titles as “All Girl Sex: Strap on Fun” — “We believe that all of it falls within the bounds of the law.”
In their Feb. 15 letter responding to Comcast, Hawkins and NCOSE CEO Patrick Trueman wrote, “All girls, boys, women, and men have a natural human dignity and thus a right to live lives free from sexual exploitation. Pornography is degrading, dehumanizing, exploitive, and a violation of this right. Pornography is a serial attack on human dignity, identity, and worth.”
Comcast runs commercials on its network demonstrating that it is a good corporate citizen. It boasts about its “social responsibility” even as it profits off the sale of pornography, which now officially recognized in Utah, South Dakota and Virginia as a “public health crisis.”
The following are NCOSE’s descriptions for their pornography-enabling “2017 Dirty Dozen.” Detailed background information is available on each of the 12 offending corporations, and each can be contacted through the site:
Amazon: “Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer, features thousands of pornography-related items in numerous categories. Items for sale on Amazon include hardcore pornographic films and magazines, books featuring collections of eroticized child nudity, sex dolls (many with childlike features), and more. From its Kindle e-reader, Amazon Prime, to Amazon Web Services, Amazon is profiting from pornography.”
American Library Association (ALA): “The ALA zealously encourages public libraries to not install Internet filters on public-access computers, thereby granting patrons, including children, the opportunity to view obscene material. This has turned the once-safe community setting of the public library into an XXX-space that fosters child sexual abuse, sexual assault, exhibitionism, stalking, and lewd behavior in libraries across the country.”
Amnesty International: “Amnesty's support for the full decriminalization of prostitution prioritizes the special interests of pimps/sex traffickers and sex buyers over the human rights of people in prostitution. Full decriminalization of prostitution grants impunity to pimps and brothel-keepers by allowing them to carry out their activities as mere ‘sex business operators,’ and creates a de facto right for men to buy people for sex. Amnesty also views prostitution as ‘sex work,’ transforming the violence inherent to prostitution into an ‘on-the-job’ requirement.”
Backpage.com: “Backpage.com brings the seedy street corners of America's red-light districts to home computers. As a classified advertising website known as ‘the hub’ for prostitution advertising, Backpage.com serves as a virtual auction block where sex buyers can shop for human beings for sex from the privacy of their home, office, hotel room, or cell phone. Many of those bought and sold via the website are sexually trafficked women and children. The website facilitates this activity by editing ads to conceal the illegality of underlying criminal activity.”
Comcast: “Comcast profits from sexual exploitation. One way it does this is by providing access to hardcore pornography via its Xfinity television packages. Comcast has even defended its provision of teen, incest, and racist-themed pornography as a benefit to their customers. Additionally, as an Internet service provider, Comcast is not proactively filtering hardcore pornography but shifts the burden of activating filters to their customers.”
Cosmopolitan: “This staple of the supermarket checkout lane is a visually hyper-sexualized and verbally pornographic magazine. With inexhaustible predictability, Cosmopolitan accosts shoppers with covers that pronounce dozens of recycled ‘sex tricks’ and flaunts an endless supply of hypersexualized cover models. As for Cosmo's content, it relentlessly glamorizes things like public-, anal-, group-, and violent sex to its young female readership.”
EBSCO Information Services: “EBSCO offers online library resources to public and private schools (K-12), colleges and universities, public libraries, and more. In its advertising for schools, it promises “fast access to curriculum-appropriate content.” However, its Explora, Science Reference Center, Literary Reference Center, and other products, provide easy access to hardcore pornography sites and extremely graphic sexual content. Innocent searches provide pornographic results. Via a system that bypasses school Internet filters, EBSCO brings the dark world of XXX to America's elementary, middle, and high school children.”
HBO: “Home Box Office Inc. (HBO) is a premium cable and satellite television network owned by Time Warner. Since the early 2000s, HBO has produced a string of original programs that incorporate graphic sex scenes. Examples include G String Divas, CatHouse: The Series, Hung, and Girls. Graphic depictions of sex, rape, and brutal sexual violence are also commonplace in Game of Thrones and Westworld. HBO has reached a new low as it turns torture porn into popular entertainment.”
Roku: “A leading manufacturer of digital media streaming devices, Roku profits from and facilitates access to hardcore pornography via hundreds of downloadable private and hidden channels. This stands in stark contrast to other streaming device industry leaders such as Apple TV or Amazon Fire TV, which have rightly kept hardcore pornography off of their systems.”
Snapchat and Snapcash: “Snapchat, the photo-sharing app popular among Millennials and teens, has been criticized for its facilitation of sexting and the sharing of child sexual abuse images (i.e., child pornography), as well as enabling the monetization of sexual content through ‘Snapcash.’ Snapchat recently made welcome improvements to allow “Discover” publishers to age-gate some sexually graphic content, but there is still much more Snapchat must do to create a safe, sexploitation-free, user environment.”
Twitter: “Famed for ‘Tweets’ that condense news and messages into 140 characters or less, Twitter is a major source of breaking news and boasts more than 300 million monthly, active users. It also serves as a major platform to disseminate hardcore pornography and facilitate prostitution. The site is riddled with sexually explicit Tweets and images, many of which serve as advertisements for pornography websites or online prostitution.”
YouTube [owned by Google]: “Google's YouTube is an Internet conduit to user-generated videos where the latest cute kitten videos share a platform with hardcore pornography and rape videos. In spite of its terms of use, it has become a major pornography portal. YouTube users may easily stumble across pornographic content via YouTube's ‘up next’ queue, which frequently included recommendations for sexually explicit material.”