Integrity Score 920
No Records Found
No Records Found
No Records Found
For the first time since the dawn of the internet, the porn industry is on defense. Here’s how it happened.
By Eric Schulzke
This story begins with a warning. It describes a court case involving stomach-churning details about what may be America’s darkest and most depraved industry. The reader will encounter scripts of sexual behavior that millions of teens on smartphones now view as routine, but which many readers will find shocking and very unsettling. The reader who chooses to read on may well find that the benefits justify the costs. However ugly the wound, the best disinfectant in such a case is usually sunlight.
The story begins in 2014 when, at the age of 13, Serena Fleites’ life was nearly destroyed by explicit videos made at the urging of her then-boyfriend. The boy, just a year older, shared them with friends. Someone posted them to Pornhub, the world’s largest porn website.
But that incident won’t define Fleites. Instead, she may well become the plaintiff who took down Pornhub. Earlier this year a federal judge in California ruled that credit card company Visa cannot wriggle out of Fleites’ suit against Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek. Fleites’ attorneys argue that Visa knowingly helped MindGeek monetize child porn. MindGeek, a privately held Canadian company, is one of the largest pornography companies in the world, with annual revenues of $460 million. Its sites averaged about 4.5 billion visits a month in 2020 — roughly double the traffic Google and Facebook receive every month combined.
For the first time since the dawn of the internet, the porn industry is on defense. Last year Germany imposed an age verification law, and this spring that nation shut down a major porn platform. After a false start, the United Kingdom is also poised to soon launch its own age verification law. Here, the U.S. lags. American kids need only click a box asserting that they are 18 to gain access to everything imaginable, and much that isn’t.
https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2022/12/30/23509490/negative-effects-of-pornography-europe-america