Name: The Dark Side of P*rnHub is Way Worse Than You Think
Uploaded: 2025-02-04T23:38:46.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Dark Side of P*rnHub is Way Worse Than You Think' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-02-04. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Dark Side of P*rnHub is Way Worse Than You Think' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-02-04. Transcript available.

how did your war against Pornhub start? Sure, I will tell you that story. Okay.
So in the context
of years in the fight against sex trafficking, so I had been fighting sex
trafficking when this
began, this began at the start of 2020. This is February 2020 when the fight to
hold Pornhub
accountable for rape, sex trafficking, child abuse began. And that was in the
context of over a
decade in the fight against trafficking at that point. And I had been paying
attention to the
headlines, obviously, when sexual abuse stories, trafficking stories came up, I
was paying
attention. And one of the stories that came up at late 2019 that really
arrested my attention,
it was a story of a 15-year-old girl, and she was from Broward County, Florida,
and she was missing
for an entire year. And she was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped
off by a Pornhub
abuser that he recognized her daughter on the site. And she was found in 58
videos being abused for
profit. These are monetized videos. Police were dispatched, and they actually
rescued her out of
his apartment. She had been impregnated. They got her out of that situation.
But that was a story that
had made some headlines, and it was a horrifying story. At the same time, there
was an investigation
that was released by the Sunday Times, the London Sunday Times. And they had
found dozens of illegal
videos on Pornhub within minutes, even children as young as three. So these two
particular stories
were standing out. There was one other that was really horrifying at the time.
It was about an adult,
a woman named Nicole Ademando, and she was from New York. And she was being
abused by her partner.
She was being raped and tortured. He was filming it, and he was uploading it to
Pornhub. And then she ended
up killing him in self-defense. But she was sentenced to life in prison,
separated from her two young
children. And thankfully, she had an amazing legal team, and they fought that,
and they got it reduced
to seven years, and she's finally out today. But it was just a heartbreaking
story. And so I, at the time,
you know, I was really actually discouraged in my fight against trafficking. I
had been doing it for a long
time. I felt like we weren't making very much progress, but, you know, it's not
something that
I can quit, because I'm dedicated to this. But I was up late one night in early
2020. I think it was,
let's see, January 31st, 2020. And I was consoling my own crying baby at that
time, because he was born,
he had a birth complication, he was a very mad baby.
What do you mean, oh, crying baby?
Yeah, crying baby.
Okay.
Yeah, he was up, you know, I was up at all hours of the night.
I thought you said, crime baby. I was like, oh, what is a crime baby?
Crime baby.
I was like, oh, what is a crime baby?
Crime baby.
No, crying baby.
Okay.
Yeah, and so I was up late, consoling him, and thinking about that story of the
15-year-old
girl. And suddenly, you know, an idea came to mind. I just said, you know what,
how are they
vetting these videos? How is this abuse ending up on Pornhub? And an idea just
flashed into
mind. I said, I'm going to test the upload system for myself, and I'm going to
see what
does it take to upload content to Pornhub. So put the baby down, got out my
phone, took
a video of the computer screen and the rug in the dark room, and I uploaded it
to Pornhub,
and I found out what millions of people already knew. Because at that time,
millions of videos
were being uploaded every year. In fact, the amount of content that was being
uploaded to
Pornhub, if you put those videos back to back, just the amount of content they
would upload
in one year, it would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to
back. That's
how much content was being uploaded.
Uploaded or had been uploaded total, you mean?
No, per year.
Wow.
Yes. That's not even counting the images.
Unbelievable.
So I tested the... I found out, like I said, what millions of people already
knew, and that
was that all it took to upload was an email address. So in under 10 minutes,
anybody with
an iPhone anywhere in the world can upload a video, and they were not checking
age, they
were not checking ID to make sure that these are not children in the videos.
They're not
verifying consent to make sure that these are not rape or trafficking victims.
And because
of that, I quickly understood that Pornhub was not a porn site, it was a crime
scene. Like,
it was infested with videos of real sexual crime.
But what, like, were some of the crimes that you see, like, saw happening? What
were some
specific instances that you were like, oh my God, this is just...
Yeah. I mean, okay, I saw...
I mean, is it okay to share those or no?
Okay.
Yeah, of course. And I think it's important to share, because I think a lot of
times people
want to just dismiss it and say, you know, what you saw was just consensual.
You just
didn't really understand that it was... You know, these were obvious crimes.
Yeah, it's vague until you make it specific, I feel like, a lot of times.
Right. So, for example, I'll tell you some... I can tell you some victim
stories. I can tell
you some of the things that I saw myself on the site. I mean, one of the worst
things that
I saw on the site was an instance where it was a young Asian woman, and she was
drugged
so completely that she was... Her body was completely limp. She was unconscious.
And there
was a masked assailant who actually, to prove to the camera that she was
unconscious, he
was lifting her eyelids and touching her eyeballs to prove that she wasn't
responsive because...
And then tickling her feet and doing things like that. And then the title was
in Chinese.
And so what I did was I took the title and I put it into Google Translate. And
the title
was dead pig unconscious after being drugged. And it included eyes half open
after being
drugged. Like that was the actual title of the video. And then, of course,
because there's
the algorithm, right? They have set up the algorithm to make sure if you see
one video like that,
they're going to assume that you like that content. So then they're going to
take you on a crazy
rabbit hole. I call it like, you know, just hell hole of rape. Like that's what
it was. And
then you go and they'll show you more and more of the same kind of thing, you
know.
And so then the people would upload them and then make money what off of
advertising on them
somehow or who makes... Yes. Yeah. So the ones that were making money off of
this content,
because this is free porn, right? Right.
So free porn is not free, right? It is heavily monetized with ads. So they were
selling 4.6 billion
ad impressions on Pornhub every single day. So they were heavily monetizing
this content. Now,
the people who were uploading were doing it mostly for free. Like 80% of people
who were uploading
were just doing it for social currency, like likes and clicks and comments and
shares and all of that.
The reason why people upload to social media. Right. Some of them were doing
pay to download
content where they could actually do profit sharing with Pornhub. That was
happening as well. But most
of the money made from free porn is actually made by the corporation running
the site. Right. So by the end
of December 2020, so they had grown to be the fifth most visited website in the
entire world.
Unbelievable.
So not just porn site, website. They had 170 million visits per day, 62 billion
visits per year. And like
I said, enough content uploaded every year would take 169 years to watch. So
they had 56 million pieces of
content on the site by the end of 2020. And this was the year that trafficking
hub movement began. So
go back to the story. So I made this discovery. Oh my God. And I said, massive.
I did. Oh,
I literally said what you just said. Oh my God. This site is infested with
videos of rape,
trafficking, non-consensual content. We used to call it revenge porn, but we
call it image-based sexual
abuse. Uh, and I have to sound the alarm on this. I have to, uh, you know, tell
people what's going on.
And so I did the only thing that I could do at the time was I took to my, it
was Twitter, right? At
the time Twitter. And I started to share this information, share the stories,
share, uh, the,
the, what I discovered about the upload process. And in a burst of inspiration,
I shared the hashtag
trafficking hub per definition. So by definition, any sex act that is
commercialized and it's involving
a child or any sex act that's induced by force, fraud, or coercion, and it's
commercialized. So
it's for profit. Like it's something of value is exchanged for that sex act. It
is per definition
and act of trafficking. So every child being abused on porn hub, every adult
who was non-consenting,
who was raped and trafficked. Those are instances of trafficking. I don't think
people quite understand
that, but that is per international definition and domestic definition. And so
that's why I launched
the trafficking hub hashtag and it slowly started to catch on. I had a few
thousand followers on
Twitter at the time, but people were horrified to find this out.
Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, I think when you hear trafficking, you kind of think like,
I mean, I picture literally like a train, like people commandeered from other
countries or,
you know, I guess younger people that have commandeered and kidnapped in like a
train
car going across the country in the night or something. Like I think of it as a,
as a more like people like being smuggled across the border or, you know, I don't
think of it as,
um, I guess the average person doesn't think of it in such a common kind of, I
don't know if it's
common as the word, I guess. Yeah. The average person probably doesn't think of
that. It's that
expansive. Right. Yeah. Well, that's the way it's portrayed in Hollywood movies.
And that's the
way that it happens often, right? Sometimes, but you know, the amount of
trafficking going on,
if you think about non-consensual commercialized sex acts, this is massive.
Um, and so unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. We found out that they only had one person.
So they had 1800 employees. They hired one person five days a week to be
reviewing videos flagged by
users as terms of service violations, including rape and trafficking and child
abuse. One person,
they had a policy where they wouldn't even review a video unless it was flagged
15 times. Now think
about this. You're a victim. Say there's a child victim like Serena. She would
have, she would have
to flag her video over 15 times because it had to be over 15 for it to be
reviewed in order for that to
even be put in queue for review. And they had a backlog of 706,000 videos.
Um, that we're just waiting for this one person to review them.
Yes. And they had like, we've discovered now in a recent, uh, filing in
December of 2024,
we found out specific instances of prepubescent child victims who had their
videos on there for
years and they would have like 14 flags, 13 flags. And they just like, that was
the policy. And then
the CEO and the executive- All of this on Pornhub.
Yes. Yes. On Pornhub. Yes. Um, and so I'm just so, I'm just grateful that we're
having this
conversation because I bet most of the people who are listening to your show
had no idea that this was
happening, that it's ever happened, that this is an issue on user generated
free porn sites.
And, and they keep it up because it's content, right? Like you're saying the
more content.
Yes. Content is king, right? They don't want to remove content because that's
how they have inventory.
So here's another like egregious example of how they did this was, so, you know,
there's one case that I
talk about in my book where there was a case of a clearly prepubescent child
who is being
anally raped in a video and she is being, uh, tortured, the tags on the video.
So the type,
like the titles and tags were describing her abuse, that she was young, um,
that she was being tortured,
all of this. And I, we reported the video. We tried to get it down. Weeks go by.
It's not coming down.
Video view counts going up, up, up. We reach out to the FBI. They demand that
it comes down. So they
connect with the national center on missing and exploited children who confirms
this as a child.
So they demanded the video come down. Okay. And then what they did was they
took the video down,
but they left that black box up that said removed at the request of the
national center for missing and
exploited children. And they left the URL live, the tags, the titles, the views,
all of that.
And they did that with so many videos. Why would they take the video down, but
leave all of that up?
And it's because it's inventory. It's the click. It's the URL shows like an ad
company that they're
going to sell to. It still says, well, we have this many videos, right? So you
could search that,
the tags, the titles, they'll still come up in Google search. Then you'll get
to the site. You
won't find that particular video, but the algorithm will then direct you to
others that are similar
and it will advertise to you. You'll get those ad views. The videos that are on
PornHub right now
are still unverified, mostly unverified. So that 5.2 million left, they had
verified the uploaders,
right? But not the individuals in the videos. So that doesn't work because
often the abuser is the
uploader. And I'll give you an example. So there's a man named Rocky Shea
Franklin out of Alabama,
and he drugged and he overpowered and he raped a 12 year old boy. And he filmed
those assaults and he
uploaded 23 of those videos to PornHub with titles that indicated this was
abuse.
Like Young, it said like Uncle Secret. I mean, I won't say the worst things,
but
it was clear, right? He was put in prison for 40 years for what he did. Police
reached out multiple
times to PornHub to try to get those videos down. They were ignored for seven
months. Those videos
stayed online, getting hundreds of thousands of views. That boy is suing PornHub
today. So he's one of
those many victims suing PornHub. But Rocky was a verified uploader. He had
shown his ID and he-
They know who he is. They know who he is, but they didn't verify clearly, right?
Like who's in the video,
right? So even today, you know, as of 2024, PornHub had to produce a report.
They sent it into the
European, there's a European law called the Digital Services Act. And in 2024,
in four and a half months,
they had to take down 3,770 child sexual abuse videos from the site and over 8,000
non-consensual and rape videos from the site, okay?
But they're having to be legally asked to do this, right?
Yeah, well, to disclose what they're doing. And today, so we found out they
kept deleting content,
right? So today, they have actually deleted 91% of the entire site. So they
went from 56 million pieces of
content in 2020 when this started to 5.2 million pieces of content today. And
we're not done because
they still have unverified content on the site, right? So yeah, it's not over
yet.
Congratulations. That's fascinating. I mean, congratulations.
What's important is victims receive the justice they need for healing and to be
a deterrent to
future abusers. Like one of the most important things in the fight against
trafficking is not just
to rescue victims, right? And to rehabilitate them. That's important. But to
prevent it from happening in
the future. And how do you prevent it? You have to increase risk and eliminate
profitability. You have
to make the risk of continued exploitation greater than the benefit that these
executives get by
maintaining the status quo. And then when you do that and you end impunity for
these abusers,
you become a deterrent to future abusers. Okay, explain that little part to me
again.
So you want to hold these companies fully accountable to the full extent of the
law. To me,
that means Pornhub gets shut down. Like we go from 91% to 100%. They do not
exist anymore because they
have been destroying the lives of countless victims since 2007 when they came
online. And when that happens,
other websites owned by other executives will say, we don't want to end up in
that position.
Right. So let's just clean ourselves up because we can make a lot of money on
legal content, right?
We don't have to monetize illegal content. We can do this in a way where we're
not distributing
sexual crime. And they'll do that because they want to avoid losing the credit
card companies.
They want to avoid litigation. They want to avoid criminal.
Just greed at a certain point is some type of risk benefit, right?
But a sickness to think that you would be able to know that that's happening,
right?
- Right. - And keep going.
- Yeah. - It's like, what type of sickness exists?
You know? I mean, it's almost like a hell, you're like a slave trader of people's
like solitude and peace, you know? But no, you know, I don't know. I just can't,
I can't even,
I can't imagine that. I can't fathom that someone would be like, yeah, this is
okay. I'm not gonna,
you know, that's not gonna be the first thing I'm gonna worry about with my
company, right?
- Yeah. And actually, as of September of 2024, Pornhub, after being criminally
charged,
right, and having to have this monitor over their site, they're finally saying
that we're gonna start
verifying the agent consent of those who are in the videos as of September of
2024.
However, they still have millions of videos that were uploaded prior that time.
- That they don't know. - That we don't know.
- Yeah. - Yeah.

The Dark Side of P*rnHub is Way Worse Than You Think

how did your war against Pornhub start? Sure, I will tell you that story. Okay.
So in the context
of years in the fight against sex trafficking, so I had been fighting sex
trafficking when this
began, this began at the start of 2020. This is February 2020 when the fight to
hold Pornhub
accountable for rape, sex trafficking, child abuse began. And that was in the
context of over a
decade in the fight against trafficking at that point. And I had been paying
attention to the
headlines, obviously, when sexual abuse stories, trafficking stories came up, I
was paying
attention. And one of the stories that came up at late 2019 that really
arrested my attention,
it was a story of a 15-year-old girl, and she was from Broward County, Florida,
and she was missing
for an entire year. And she was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped
off by a Pornhub
abuser that he recognized her daughter on the site. And she was found in 58
videos being abused for
profit. These are monetized videos. Police were dispatched, and they actually
rescued her out of
his apartment. She had been impregnated. They got her out of that situation.
But that was a story that
had made some headlines, and it was a horrifying story. At the same time, there
was an investigation
that was released by the Sunday Times, the London Sunday Times. And they had
found dozens of illegal
videos on Pornhub within minutes, even children as young as three. So these two
particular stories
were standing out. There was one other that was really horrifying at the time.
It was about an adult,
a woman named Nicole Ademando, and she was from New York. And she was being
abused by her partner.
She was being raped and tortured. He was filming it, and he was uploading it to
Pornhub. And then she ended
up killing him in self-defense. But she was sentenced to life in prison,
separated from her two young
children. And thankfully, she had an amazing legal team, and they fought that,
and they got it reduced
to seven years, and she's finally out today. But it was just a heartbreaking
story. And so I, at the time,
you know, I was really actually discouraged in my fight against trafficking. I
had been doing it for a long
time. I felt like we weren't making very much progress, but, you know, it's not
something that
I can quit, because I'm dedicated to this. But I was up late one night in early
2020. I think it was,
let's see, January 31st, 2020. And I was consoling my own crying baby at that
time, because he was born,
he had a birth complication, he was a very mad baby.
What do you mean, oh, crying baby?
Yeah, crying baby.
Okay.
Yeah, he was up, you know, I was up at all hours of the night.
I thought you said, crime baby. I was like, oh, what is a crime baby?
Crime baby.
I was like, oh, what is a crime baby?
Crime baby.
No, crying baby.
Okay.
Yeah, and so I was up late, consoling him, and thinking about that story of the
15-year-old
girl. And suddenly, you know, an idea came to mind. I just said, you know what,
how are they
vetting these videos? How is this abuse ending up on Pornhub? And an idea just
flashed into
mind. I said, I'm going to test the upload system for myself, and I'm going to
see what
does it take to upload content to Pornhub. So put the baby down, got out my
phone, took
a video of the computer screen and the rug in the dark room, and I uploaded it
to Pornhub,
and I found out what millions of people already knew. Because at that time,
millions of videos
were being uploaded every year. In fact, the amount of content that was being
uploaded to
Pornhub, if you put those videos back to back, just the amount of content they
would upload
in one year, it would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to
back. That's
how much content was being uploaded.
Uploaded or had been uploaded total, you mean?
No, per year.
Wow.
Yes. That's not even counting the images.
Unbelievable.
So I tested the... I found out, like I said, what millions of people already
knew, and that
was that all it took to upload was an email address. So in under 10 minutes,
anybody with
an iPhone anywhere in the world can upload a video, and they were not checking
age, they
were not checking ID to make sure that these are not children in the videos.
They're not
verifying consent to make sure that these are not rape or trafficking victims.
And because
of that, I quickly understood that Pornhub was not a porn site, it was a crime
scene. Like,
it was infested with videos of real sexual crime.
But what, like, were some of the crimes that you see, like, saw happening? What
were some
specific instances that you were like, oh my God, this is just...
Yeah. I mean, okay, I saw...
I mean, is it okay to share those or no?
Okay.
Yeah, of course. And I think it's important to share, because I think a lot of
times people
want to just dismiss it and say, you know, what you saw was just consensual.
You just
didn't really understand that it was... You know, these were obvious crimes.
Yeah, it's vague until you make it specific, I feel like, a lot of times.
Right. So, for example, I'll tell you some... I can tell you some victim
stories. I can tell
you some of the things that I saw myself on the site. I mean, one of the worst
things that
I saw on the site was an instance where it was a young Asian woman, and she was
drugged
so completely that she was... Her body was completely limp. She was unconscious.
And there
was a masked assailant who actually, to prove to the camera that she was
unconscious, he
was lifting her eyelids and touching her eyeballs to prove that she wasn't
responsive because...
And then tickling her feet and doing things like that. And then the title was
in Chinese.
And so what I did was I took the title and I put it into Google Translate. And
the title
was dead pig unconscious after being drugged. And it included eyes half open
after being
drugged. Like that was the actual title of the video. And then, of course,
because there's
the algorithm, right? They have set up the algorithm to make sure if you see
one video like that,
they're going to assume that you like that content. So then they're going to
take you on a crazy
rabbit hole. I call it like, you know, just hell hole of rape. Like that's what
it was. And
then you go and they'll show you more and more of the same kind of thing, you
know.
And so then the people would upload them and then make money what off of
advertising on them
somehow or who makes... Yes. Yeah. So the ones that were making money off of
this content,
because this is free porn, right? Right.
So free porn is not free, right? It is heavily monetized with ads. So they were
selling 4.6 billion
ad impressions on Pornhub every single day. So they were heavily monetizing
this content. Now,
the people who were uploading were doing it mostly for free. Like 80% of people
who were uploading
were just doing it for social currency, like likes and clicks and comments and
shares and all of that.
The reason why people upload to social media. Right. Some of them were doing
pay to download
content where they could actually do profit sharing with Pornhub. That was
happening as well. But most
of the money made from free porn is actually made by the corporation running
the site. Right. So by the end
of December 2020, so they had grown to be the fifth most visited website in the
entire world.
Unbelievable.
So not just porn site, website. They had 170 million visits per day, 62 billion
visits per year. And like
I said, enough content uploaded every year would take 169 years to watch. So
they had 56 million pieces of
content on the site by the end of 2020. And this was the year that trafficking
hub movement began. So
go back to the story. So I made this discovery. Oh my God. And I said, massive.
I did. Oh,
I literally said what you just said. Oh my God. This site is infested with
videos of rape,
trafficking, non-consensual content. We used to call it revenge porn, but we
call it image-based sexual
abuse. Uh, and I have to sound the alarm on this. I have to, uh, you know, tell
people what's going on.
And so I did the only thing that I could do at the time was I took to my, it
was Twitter, right? At
the time Twitter. And I started to share this information, share the stories,
share, uh, the,
the, what I discovered about the upload process. And in a burst of inspiration,
I shared the hashtag
trafficking hub per definition. So by definition, any sex act that is
commercialized and it's involving
a child or any sex act that's induced by force, fraud, or coercion, and it's
commercialized. So
it's for profit. Like it's something of value is exchanged for that sex act. It
is per definition
and act of trafficking. So every child being abused on porn hub, every adult
who was non-consenting,
who was raped and trafficked. Those are instances of trafficking. I don't think
people quite understand
that, but that is per international definition and domestic definition. And so
that's why I launched
the trafficking hub hashtag and it slowly started to catch on. I had a few
thousand followers on
Twitter at the time, but people were horrified to find this out.
Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, I think when you hear trafficking, you kind of think like,
I mean, I picture literally like a train, like people commandeered from other
countries or,
you know, I guess younger people that have commandeered and kidnapped in like a
train
car going across the country in the night or something. Like I think of it as a,
as a more like people like being smuggled across the border or, you know, I don't
think of it as,
um, I guess the average person doesn't think of it in such a common kind of, I
don't know if it's
common as the word, I guess. Yeah. The average person probably doesn't think of
that. It's that
expansive. Right. Yeah. Well, that's the way it's portrayed in Hollywood movies.
And that's the
way that it happens often, right? Sometimes, but you know, the amount of
trafficking going on,
if you think about non-consensual commercialized sex acts, this is massive.
Um, and so unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. We found out that they only had one person.
So they had 1800 employees. They hired one person five days a week to be
reviewing videos flagged by
users as terms of service violations, including rape and trafficking and child
abuse. One person,
they had a policy where they wouldn't even review a video unless it was flagged
15 times. Now think
about this. You're a victim. Say there's a child victim like Serena. She would
have, she would have
to flag her video over 15 times because it had to be over 15 for it to be
reviewed in order for that to
even be put in queue for review. And they had a backlog of 706,000 videos.
Um, that we're just waiting for this one person to review them.
Yes. And they had like, we've discovered now in a recent, uh, filing in
December of 2024,
we found out specific instances of prepubescent child victims who had their
videos on there for
years and they would have like 14 flags, 13 flags. And they just like, that was
the policy. And then
the CEO and the executive- All of this on Pornhub.
Yes. Yes. On Pornhub. Yes. Um, and so I'm just so, I'm just grateful that we're
having this
conversation because I bet most of the people who are listening to your show
had no idea that this was
happening, that it's ever happened, that this is an issue on user generated
free porn sites.
And, and they keep it up because it's content, right? Like you're saying the
more content.
Yes. Content is king, right? They don't want to remove content because that's
how they have inventory.
So here's another like egregious example of how they did this was, so, you know,
there's one case that I
talk about in my book where there was a case of a clearly prepubescent child
who is being
anally raped in a video and she is being, uh, tortured, the tags on the video.
So the type,
like the titles and tags were describing her abuse, that she was young, um,
that she was being tortured,
all of this. And I, we reported the 