(LifeSiteNews) — On this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show, Jonathon sits down with anti-porn activist and author Josh Gilman to discuss the latest news on the lawsuits against Pornhub and what can be done to stop our pornography pandemic.
Beginning the program, Gilman notes that while Pornhub is not the worst porn website on the internet, what has come out in the discovery phase of the lawsuits against the site allows one to look at “what was going on behind the scenes here.” Recounting what came out about Pornhub in discovery, Gilman remarks that what was found “just confirmed how much content there was that Pornhub knew was most likely illegal or at least abusive, non-consensual.”
“The overall headline of that is that for all their talk about how they had a… robust system to make sure that… child pornography and abusive content and non-consensual videos, all these things are not on there, they only had one person assigned to review the videos,” he continues, adding that a video had to be flagged more than 15 times for it to be reviewed.
Gilman also states that 700,000 out of the millions of videos on the porn site were flagged for such a review. Discussing the implications of the number, Gilman tells Jonathon that out of the almost 14 million videos on Pornhub before the company decided to remove 10 million of them, if 700,000 were flagged, then “one out of every 19 videos would have been on that list.”
“We have to accept that we as a society who [have] normalized pornography, as people who have made excuses for it in our life, have been contributing to the abuse and degradation of other people,” Gilman declares.
Explaining what can be done to combat pornography use altogether, Gilman points to a bipartisan bill in the Canadian Parliament, S-210, that according to him puts in place “meaningful age verification” on porn sites.
“Call your [Member of Parliament (MP)], you tell them that this matters to you,” he tells Jonathon. “Tell them that you’re an engaged voter and… then you tell all your friends… Don’t just stop with you.”
“We’re uniquely positioned as Canadians to help shut this down,” Gilman declares, noting that the company that owns Pornhub is based in Montreal. He also addresses two possible arguments against the censorship of pornography, one whereby one doesn’t “believe governments should do anything about anything,” and another whereby government may become too empowered.
READ: What is the best way to protect your children from pornography addiction?
To the first, Gilman points out that “every click” on a pornographic video is “abusing people and funding abuse,” and that abstaining from pornography is a way to stop the abuse. To the second, Gilman says that people have a “base responsibility… to protect children.”
Later in the episode, Gilman addresses what he thinks could happen to Pornhub as a result of the lawsuits. In his opinion, the only way to get rid of Pornhub is to get rid of its parent company, given its control of a good portion of the porn industry.
He also notes that the porn industry is worried about the future in light of the legal problems it faces. “I would suspect that the best thing that could happen is that some of these people finally do go to jail,” Gilman tells Jonathon, adding that he would not be surprised if the number of people consuming pornography went down in the next decade or so, comparing the situation with that of cigarette use.
When asked about new porn sites like OnlyFans, which seeks to bring pornography directly to consumers, Gilman says that the solution is to educate people, go into schools to discuss the effects of pornography, and push for legislation that would limit porn sites like Pornhub.
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