What goes through the minds of people working at porn companies profiting from videos of children being raped? Thanks to a filing error in a Federal District Court in Alabama, releasing thousands of pages of internal documents from Pornhub that were meant to be sealed, we now know. One internal document indicates that Pornhub as of May 2020 had 706,000 videos available on the site that had been flagged by users for depicting rape or assaults on children or for other problems. In the message traffic, one employee advises another not to copy a manager when they find sex videos with children. The other has the obvious response: "He doesn't want to know how much C.P. we have ignored for the past five years?" C.P. is short for child pornography. One private memo acknowledged that videos with apparent child sexual abuse had been viewed 684 million times before being removed. Pornhub produced these documents during discovery in a civil suit by an Alabama woman who beginning at age 16 was filmed engaging in sex acts, including at least once when she was drugged and then raped. These videos of her were posted on Pornhub and amassed thousands of views. One discovery memo showed that there were 155,447 videos on Pornhub with the keyword "12yo." Other categories that the company tracked were "11yo," "degraded teen," "under 10" and "extreme choking." (It has since removed these searches.) Google ... has been central to the business model of companies publishing nonconsensual imagery. Google also directs users to at least one website that monetizes assaults on victims of human trafficking.
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