PETITION: Authorities must shut down Pornhub after showing videos of 15-year-old trafficking victim! Sign the petition here.
WARNING: This report contains disturbing content.
MONTREAL, Quebec, March 6, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — A protest will be held on International Women’s Day outside the Montreal office of MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub, the world’s largest pornography website.
The demonstrators are calling for Pornhub to be closed down based on “corroborated evidence that the company is aiding and profiting off of the sex trafficking and sexual exploitation of women and children,” says a press release from Traffickinghub, which is sponsoring the event.
Traffickinghub is the campaign to close PornHub that is being spearheaded by Laila Mickelwait, of the California-based pornography abolition organization Exodus Cry.
Mickelwait broke the story in February that Pornhub had uploaded dozens of videos to its site of a 15-year-old victim of human-trafficking being raped.
Pornhub subsequently admitted it had “verified” the girl, who had been missing for more than a year, as a “model with valid 18+ ID.”
The “shocking evidence that Pornhub does not require verification of the age or consent of millions of people featured in hardcore sex acts on its site” created worldwide outrage, which is what organizers of the March 8 rally in Montreal “want to publicize,” the Traffickinghub press release stated.
“Pornhub is described as a ‘super predator’ with 42 billion visits per year that generate enormous profits for MindGeek and its executives,” it said.
“PayPal recently pulled its services from the site amid evidence surfacing that over 118 instances of child sexual abuse were found on the site by the Internet Watch Foundation. These instances are seen as just the tip of the iceberg.”
The rally is the latest initiative in a number of efforts to shut down Pornhub, with the Traffickinghub campaign “supported by a broad spectrum of over 75 organizations as well as experts and survivors of all backgrounds.” Mickelwait’s petition has reached nearly 368,000 signatures thus far.
LifeSite also launched a petition asking U.S. and Canadian authorities to investigate and shut down Pornhub.
It has gone viral, with 21,000 people signing in under 24 hours, said Scott Schittl, LifeSite’s campaign coordinator.
“People want to know if there are more victims of human-trafficking, rape, and child pornography still hosted on Pornhub, and they want to know if Pornhub has profited from these vile activities,” he said.
“People, on the right and the left, want justice after this case…they want Pornhub investigated and shut down.”
Meanwhile, Georges Buscemi of the Montreal-based Campagne-Quebec Vie has been publicizing the little-known fact that Pornhub’s parent company is MindGeek.
Buscemi told LifeSite’s John-Henry Westen that he received a tip that Pornhub was located in his city when gathering information on the sex-ed lobby.
He investigated and discovered that three Concordia University students started the business back in 2003. They had the high-level coding skills to build the complicated algorithms needed set up and monetize affiliate networks — those legions of free porn sites used to funnel porn users to sites they will pay for.
Pornhub is based in Montreal because “Montreal is a programmer and geek hub” and home to a number of universities that churn out “highly qualified programmers,” he explained.
When YouTube became mainstream in 2005, the students created Pornhub, which Buscemi described as “the YouTube of porn,” and the company’s growth exploded.
MindGeek keeps a low profile and operates out of a nondescript building where it makes enormous amounts of money — generating over $800 million (CDN) a year and millions of views every day — as evidence mounts that it is complicit in and abets sex-trafficking, rape, and the exploitation of women and children while politicians look the other way.
“They want to portray themselves as a run-of-the-mill bland startup tech company and that they’re just a bunch of geeks and that they like programming…they want to keep it that way because they don't want anyone to be embarrassed or uncomfortable with the situation.”
Buscemi is determined to do what he can to expose MindGeek. To this end, he contacted Mickelwait.
The result is Sunday’s demonstration at MindGeek, which Mickelwait is publicizing to the thousands who signed her petition.
According to the Traffickinghub press release, Megan Walker, executive director of the London Abused Women’s Centre in Ontario, will lead the rally, which will be attended by independent senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, as well as “women and children’s advocacy NGOs, activists, and concerned citizens.”
It will be held at 7777 Decarie Blvd., Montreal, Quebec, Canada, from 1:00 to 3:00 P.M.
Sign the petition here asking authorities to shut down Pornhub.