Laila Mickelwait
speaker
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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait · 2 Dec 2024
podcast
Although there are many, many, you know, it's increasing in the number of girls.
No, I don't know that exact proportion. I do know it's still boys primarily that are primarily being exposed, but girls as well are consuming this kind of content at very young ages as well.
Sure, absolutely. Well, you know, they're distributing, like I said, criminal content. These are crime scenes. These are not consenting adults that I'm talking about. That's not The focus of my work is underage victims, victims of rape, sex trafficking, non-consensual and misused abuse that are proliferating on these sites. They have made intentional policy decisions.
Let's just take MindGeek and PornHub. I want to give you some of that factual background so you can understand, first of all, the complicity of this company, but then we can zoom back from PornHub to speak about the industry of user-generated porn as a whole and how We can also hold all of these companies accountable and not just Pornhub.
But I've gone on a journey of discovery over the last four years, kind of like peeling back the onion layers of this corporation and understanding how it works and what I call the deep complicity of Pornhub. I'll give you an example. Pornhub owns most of the world's most popular tube sites. I told you how many videos are uploaded to Pornhub every year.
They made a decision to only hire 30 moderators at their office in Cyprus to be reviewing this content, 10 moderators working at a time. They were reprimanded if they viewed less than 700 videos. per eight-hour shift. Some of them were watching up to 2,000 videos per eight-hour shift, just clicking through those videos with the sound off. All the while, they knew they weren't verifying ID or age.
And this was a guessing game. They were playing Russian roulette with real people's lives, with victims' lives. And that wasn't just for Pornhub. So that was all of the PornTube sites. They had 10. moderating. Compare that to Facebook's 15,000. They still don't have enough moderators even at Facebook. But make that comparison. That was an intentional decision.
And those moderators, I spoke to them for dozens of hours. I consider some of them friends at this point because we've spent so much time together discussing how this worked. And they said that their job was more to allow as much content to go through as possible. So Content is king for the porn tube sites.
They have to have massive amounts of content in order to drive those Google searches, in order to drive the traffic and sell the advertising.
Well, it's the advertising. So mostly, you know, they're making money off of premium subscriptions so that you could buy, you know, so you can pay $9.99 or $19.99 a month and you can watch porn or you can watch the real rape ad-free. They were selling pay-to-download content, which was a small portion of the content on Pornhub.
But there's many examples of victims even in that pay-to-download content. There was a 12-year-old boy in Alabama, and he was drugged, and he was overpowered, and he was raped in 23 videos by a man named Rocky Shea Franklin. and that was pay to download content where he entered into a profit-sharing relationship with Pornhub to split that 35%, 65% for Rocky, 35% for Pornhub.
They were selling those videos Police reached out multiple times to Pornhub demanding those videos be removed, and they were ignored. They stayed on the site for seven months, hundreds of thousands of views. They put an intentional download button on every single piece of content on Pornhub. Again, an intentional policy decision to place that.
And that's not like a YouTube download where you can just access it when you're off of the internet. This was a possession of that content. It was a transfer from 1,700 servers that Pornhub has. a transfer of that illegal criminal content onto the devices of potentially 5 million users an hour so that that child's trauma could then be immortalized.
And these victims, they call it the immortalization of their trauma, where they say, you know, it was one thing when I was raped, but to have that filmed and then uploaded, monetized for profit and pleasure and globally distributed so that it will be downloaded and uploaded for the rest of my life.
Yeah, for victims, exactly. And it's a sadistic game of whack-a-mole for them where they would beg Pornhub to get these videos down. I mean, the testimony of so many of these victims was they would beg for these videos. I saw the emails, the begging emails, and they would be hassled by Pornhub. They would make them prove, this is the testimony of these victims.
They would have to prove that they were underage or they would have to prove that they were victims. in order to get a video down if they even had an answer at all. Because we also have uncovered that Pornhub had 1,800 employees, okay? They're making hundreds of millions of dollars a year. They employed one person five days a week
to be reviewing videos flagged by users for violating terms of service, including child sexual abuse, rape, and trafficking. And they had a policy where you had to flag a video 15 times in order for it to be put in queue for review, and they had a backlog of 706,000 flagged videos. And that means a victim could flag their video 15 times. It wouldn't even have been put in line for review.
These are those intentional policy decisions that I'm talking about. And so these victims, they would beg for them to come down. They would be hassled. But even if they did get it down, it would just get re-uploaded again and again and again and again. And at some point, they just give up. Some of them become suicidal. We know now that this is actually a life and death issue for victims.
The stakes are so high. Of course. Because, you know, surveys are showing that 50% of these victims of this kind of distribution of these non-consensual sexual images, child sexual abuse, they have suicidal ideations. Many of them consider suicide. Some of them actually attempt it. Many of them do. And that's what happens to these victims. And so, I mean, it's just...
Tragic what's allowed to happen and intentionally done and going to holding them accountable. We can hold them accountable. We are holding them accountable thanks to the help of many people. We're not there yet, but Pornhub was forced to take down 91% of their content. From when this began to today, we now have numbers.
Showing 281–300 of 585 · page 15 of 30
← Previous
Next →