Pornhub exposed
by Jo Bartosch, The Critic:
The tenth most visited website in the world was effectively castrated by a middle-aged American mum.
In December 2020, Pornhub, the world’s largest provider of free pornography and the tenth most visited website in the world, was effectively castrated by a middle-aged American mum. Armed with nothing but a laptop and a working moral compass, activist Laila Mickelwait forced the site to remove 80 per cent of its content. Takedown is the story of how she did it.
Part memoir, part gripping crime thriller, Takedown describes in forensic detail how Micklewait forced Pornhub to admit it had been knowingly profiting — along with some of the world’s biggest payment providers including Mastercard and Visa — from child abuse, rape and human trafficking.
Mickelwait’s crusade against Pornhub was not sparked by reading Andrea Dworkin; she is no strident women’s liberationist. A Christian, she recalls wanting to follow in the footsteps of her late father, a man with a commitment to human rights. Accordingly, the target of her campaign is the abolition of illegal trafficking rather than an ideological objection to pornography.
This approach might make the book less interesting to the minority of radical feminist readers like me, but it is also undoubtedly the key to her extraordinary success. With savvy pragmatism, Mickelwait tapped into the disgust of mainstream America, starting a petition which gained over two million signatures. This launched the Traffickinghub movement.
Traffickinghub brought multi-billion-dollar Pornhub, whose parent company MindGeek (now called Aylo) owned more than 100 “tube” sites, to its knees. What Mickelwait exposed eventually forced the company to delete 80 per cent of its entire website as it removed 10.6 million videos and over 30 million images.
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