Laila Mickelwait

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585 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Apr 2025

Laila Mickelwait’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait · 2 Dec 2024 podcast

And most people would have heard that name before because You know, when in 2020, when this movement to hold Pornhub accountable for globally distributing and monetizing countless videos of child sexual abuse, rape, sex trafficking, and other forms of non-consensual violence. criminal image-based sexual abuse.

When this began in 2020, Pornhub was the largest and most popular porn site in the world. They had, at the height of 2020 and December, this was kind of the height of this website, they had 170 million visits per day. They had 62 billion visits to that site that year. And they had enough videos being uploaded, 6.8 million videos uploaded to the site.

That would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to back. So researchers in 2020 named Pornhub the third most influential tech company on global society, just behind Facebook and Google. And it was the fifth most, according to the CEO of Pornhub. In December of 2020, it was the fifth most trafficked website in the world. Not just porn site, website.

Yes, meaning visits.

And so this is a massive website, but it's one of many websites. So MindGeek owns, they estimate, about 80% of the world's most popular porn sites and brands, including most of the world's most popular tube sites. And to understand this— Tube sites. Tube sites. So these are the YouTubes of porn.

So Pornhub is the YouTube of porn, meaning this is user-generated content where anybody can become a pornographer. If you have an iPhone, if you have a camera in the back of a car, in a hotel room, in a park, wherever, you can film a sex act and you can upload it to YouTube. the porn tube sites, Pornhub being the most popular.

So what happened was, I had been investigating this, my antennas were up, I was paying attention to this intersection between the pornography industry, sex trafficking, and child sexual abuse. At the end of 2019, I began to hear some stories in the media that were very concerning, that really arrested my attention.

There was also at the same time an investigation done by the London Sunday Times that really caught my attention. And they found dozens of videos, illegal videos, dozens of illegal videos on the site within minutes, even children as young as three years old.

They had noted that they had found that there was over 100 instances that were cited in this particular investigation of category A level child sexual abuse. So category A level is not just children playing in a bathtub as bad as that would be on a porn site. But these are sadistic acts of harm to children meant to induce terror and pain. And I was just thinking about these cases.

And I was up late one night. taking care of my very fussy crying baby. And I was thinking about the question that was haunting me at the time. My dad was really wise and he said, assumption is the mother of all screw ups. We're assuming that this is all vetted content, but I had that question haunting me. And so I had an idea.

I said, I'm gonna test the upload system and see what it takes for myself to upload content to this site. And when I did that, I put my baby to bed, took out my laptop and my phone and tested the upload system. And I found out what millions of people already knew in under 10 minutes, That video was live on the site. It was a video of the rug and the keyboard.

And at that moment, everything made sense. And I realized that the site was infested with videos of real sexual crime and that Pornhub was not a porn site. It was actually a crime scene. And that's kind of how... Is there a difference? There is legal material. I mean, legal... Pornography is legal under the laws of the United States of Canada.

But when it's a child or when it's a non-consenting adult or when it's even filmed consensually and uploaded non-consensually, there's a spectrum of abuse. This was the business model. They were selling 4.6 billion ad impressions on Pornhub every day. And that was how they were generating their traffic.

Yeah. I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars a year is generated for MindGeek, ILO. How do you spell ILO? A-Y-L-O.

That's the rebrand. Right. And so intentional decision. And I mean, over the course of the last four years, you know, as this kind of started to go viral on social media, a petition that I started in early 2020 to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable. And today we have two point three million people. Signatures from every country in the world.

And as this was spreading, victims were coming forward and whistleblowers and insiders from the company were coming forward. And they taught me not just how this content was getting uploaded, but why it was getting uploaded. And again, it's the business model of free user-generated porn. Yeah.

Okay, so now... But we can hold those who are distributing it accountable.

Can we? Yes, we absolutely can. Who are these people? Well, first I want to kind of just, you know, basically acknowledge what you just said is absolutely true, is that today, on these free porn tube sites, Again, free. There wasn't even an RU18 click-through button at the beginning of 2020 where any seven-year-old could just click right through.

End up on the homepage of Pornhub or Xvideos for free. And what they're seeing on the homepage is not your father's Playboy, right? It's not the images that you were describing. Yeah. It is, you know, there was a study done that was published in the British Journal of Criminology, and they analyzed the homepages of these sites.

And when you get onto Pornhub, there's about 50 videos that you will see that they, if you scroll over, they autoplay. And these are these homemade, user-generated videos. And they found that one in eight of those videos was displaying sexual violence. You know, videos that would include non-consent, incest. And I think that is just so alarming that that is the reality that we're living in today.

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