For more than a decade, both amateurs and professionals shared their sometimes sweet, sometimes weird, and often graphic sexual activity on Pornhub. Launched in 2007 not long after YouTube and with a similar free-for-all spirit, the site represented a new wave of "adult entertainment" in which anyone with an internet connection could partake and anyone with a digital camera could become a star.
Dubbed "tube sites," Pornhub and its various peers began to dominate web traffic generally and porn consumption specifically. These sites trod on porn's established business model, but for savvy sex workers the tube site network could provide a way to break into the business or reach audiences directly, without the porn industry's usual middlemen. To monetize one's presence in the early days took some creativity, but tube sites would eventually offer content partnerships that allowed people to get paid directly for their videos. Their competitors, such as cam sites and clip stores, made the process of charging money and getting paid even smoother.
The result? For the first time, people with a truly diverse array of body types, looks, races, ethnicities, sexualities, gender identities, and kinks had direct access to the tools of porn production and distribution. In the past, porn had catered to a much more narrow range of tastes, with predictable results. Now audiences could access all sorts of content that defied conventional notions of who and what was deserving of lust. On sites like Pornhub and the microblogging platform Tumblr, outside-the-mainstream content thrived.
And then, one day, it was gone.
In December 2020, without warning, Pornhub removed all videos posted by unverified users—a massive cache of content encompassing anything not posted by formal content partners or members of the platform's official model program. More than 10 million videos were suspended, and unverified users were banned from uploading or downloading new videos.
It was more than a disruption to the site. The unannounced disappearing of so many videos was "a huge cultural loss," says Ashley, a transgender sex worker and civil rights activist with a robust presence on social media and in offline organizing. (At Ashley's request, we're identifying her by first name only.) Ashley volunteers with the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) Behind Bars, a group dedicated to helping incarcerated sex workers. She recently helped spearhead a campaign protesting financial discrimination against sex workers and LGBTQ content creators. Unverified videos, Ashley says, are "inclusive, just by definition, of all the queer content that people felt unsafe with being directly affiliated with."
The Pornhub purge came about two years after Tumblr's ban on any content depicting sex acts, and preceded a similar announcement in summer 2021 from OnlyFans, a subscription content site popularized by sex workers. OnlyFans would later reverse this edict, but the fate of adult content on the site remains uncertain.
Then, in September 2021, the first user-uploaded porn site—Xtube, founded in 2006 and now owned by the same parent company as Pornhub—shut down entirely.
Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent FederalCourt Decisions
Demand for online porn hasn't weakened, at least not according to web traffic numbers. Nor do there seem to be fewer people willing to create and post it; it's not uncommon to hear sex workers complain about the glut of adult content creators these days.
Nonetheless, it's a financially precarious, and perhaps even dangerous, time to be in the business of online porn. And one of the biggest reasons why is that a constellation of activist groups, rooted in deeply conservative opposition to virtually any depiction of sexuality in the public sphere, have put considerable pressure on the middlemen who keep online porn in business. In some cases, that pressure has led to the creation of onerous new laws; in others, it has been aided by support from powerful figures in business and government. These groups have repeatedly sought to conflate the existence of consensual commercial sex and porn production with the prospect of forced sexual exploitation, often with lurid statistics about exploited minors that don't stand up to scrutiny.
Although these groups say their aim is merely to rid the web of abuse, it's clear that their true goal is to eliminate the vast majority of adult sexual content from the web through a combination of legal pressure tactics, lobbying for new laws, and political intimidation. It's a campaign for a sex-free web. Rather than help vulnerable women, these efforts threaten to make life worse for the very people they claim to want to help—while simultaneously stifling internet expression more broadly.
From 'Morality' to 'Exploitation'
Few organizations have done as much to try to squelch online porn as the group that for most of its life was known as Morality in Media. The group was founded in 1962 to fight countercultural influences, especially those with sexually explicit material. In 1969, for example, it went after underground newspapers for "obscenities" and "push[ing] drug usage as the 'in' thing." In 1971, its target was "titillating ads in the U.S. mails," along with "smut in media"—including "nudie, homosexual, sado-masochistic and teen-age sex books"—that might be "inciting our nation's youth to violence, perversion, promiscuity, drug experimentation, hatred and tastelessness."
By the early '80s, the group was bemoaning adult bookstores, soap operas, and MTV. "Really and truly, soap operas are destroying the family's moral base," its president said in 1984. In the '90s, it railed against daytime talk shows and sitcoms depicting sex outside marriage. The specific nature of the threat was always shifting, but the core crusade was always about mass media portrayals of sexual activity that didn't align with traditional values.
In 2015, the group rebranded as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). Since then, the internet and tech companies have become its primary targets. Search engines, social media, online classified ads, digital marketplaces, and streaming video services have all found themselves under fire, along with online pornography platforms like Pornhub and OnlyFans.
Today, the group tends to trade the language of "decency" and morality for feminist-tinged talk of consent, objectification, violence against women, and sex trafficking. Pornhub "normalizes themes of racism, incest, and violence against women," NCOSE said in a 2019 press release. HBO profits "from sexual objectification, exploitation, and violence," it declared in 2016. NCOSE describes its work broadly as "exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sex abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking, and the public health harms of pornography."
Underneath it all, though, NCOSE is still the same old musty conservative values group aimed at eradicating sexuality in the public sphere. It cloaks that under a mantle of saving the children, and it uses intimidation and legal pressure to get what it wants.
In recent years, the group's annual "dirty dozen" list has condemned the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue for "sending a message that women's bodies are for public consumption," Cosmopolitan magazine for "hypersexualized cover models," Seattle coffee stands for having scantily clad baristas, Amazon Prime Video for showing "simulated sex scenes," and Netflix for featuring "gratuitous amounts of nudity."
"When Netflix, a highly influential platform with over 200 million users across the globe, hosts sexually explicit content like 'Cuties,' 'Big Mouth,' and 'Sex Education,' it deserves to be called out for profiting from sexually exploitative content," says NCOSE CEO Dawn Hawkins. "Sexual exploitation is not entertainment."
NCOSE is one of a handful of influential groups intent on recasting a wide range of sexual content and activities as "exploitation." It's joined by groups such as Exodus Cry, which was born out of an evangelical Christian church in Kansas City and bills itself as foe of "commercial sexual exploitation"; the Justice Defense Fund, a lobbying and litigation group founded by the anti-porn activist Laila Mickelwait; and Demand Abolition, an anti–sex work group founded by the oil heiress and Clinton-era ambassador Swanee Hunt.
Though they speak the language of feminism, these groups are steeped in the spirit of conservative purity culture—an evangelical ethos popularized in the 1980s and '90s. Purity culture hinges on abstinence rituals like virginity pledges, chastity rings, and father-daughter "purity balls." It's predicated on the notion that sexual activity should be relegated to monogamous and heterosexual married couples, and it preaches strict gender roles, female modesty, and total abstinence from premarital sex. It often rests on the idea that promiscuity not only destroys a woman's value as a partner but her emotional stability and self-worth.
Some prominent anti-porn activists spring directly from this world. Exodus Cry founder Benjamin Nolot has distanced himself and his organization from the group's evangelical roots, but he became known for giving talks like "contending for purity in a pornified world," in which he defines sexual immorality as "all sexual activity outside of the marriage covenant between one man and one woman." Others come from a radical feminist background that eschews gender norms and embraces queerness yet sounds strangely like its religious right counterpart when it comes to sex work. In both frameworks, women who participate in porn are ruined. Men who watch porn are damaged. Porn "kills love" and threatens the well-being of American women and families.
A shared goal of these groups is to remake the internet as a sex-free zone by casting a vast swath of nontraditional sexual activity as "sexual exploitation" or "human trafficking," especially if it involves the transfer of money, even indirectly. "Any content that turns people into public sexual commodities has no place on the Internet or in society," Hawkins says.
This strategy has had remarkable success, earning an audience and acclaim among reporters, politicians, and prominent feminists unlikely to be so kind to a band of moralistic Bible-thumpers denouncing promiscuity and calling sex outside marriage a sin. The purity culture ethos of shame, abstinence, and fallen women still permeates these groups' activism. But it's been repackaged as a bid to protect women and kids from trauma and sexual harm rather than to uphold the sanctity of marriage and biblical womanhood.
A central plank of this strategy is litigation.
In January 2021, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit accusing Twitter of sex trafficking. The basis for this claim is that the social media site temporarily hosted a link to a video, hosted on a separate site, featuring two teenagers engaged in sex acts. The minors had taken the video themselves and shared it with a third party via Snapchat. In August, a judge ruled against Twitter's motion to dismiss the case.
In February 2021, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit against MindGeek, the parent company behind a number of porn sites, including Pornhub. In the suit, which is also ongoing, two Jane Does accuse Pornhub of hosting videos without their consent. And in March, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit against WebGroup Czech Republic, the company behind one of the world's most visited porn platforms, XVideos.
In all of these cases, an underlying kernel of harm is alleged, such as a teen being blackmailed into sending a stranger sex videos or women being duped into appearing in online porn. But rather than target the perpetrators of that harm directly, the NCOSE strategy is to go after platforms that—however briefly or unknowingly—hosted evidence of it taking place.
None of these suits would have a chance at success without the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2018 (FOSTA), a law that NCOSE backed. In addition to making it a federal crime to host content that facilitates prostitution, FOSTA amended the federal statute known as Section 230—which says that individuals and intermediaries online aren't always legally liable for content, interactions, and transactions by clients or users—to make it easier for private citizens and state attorneys general to sue digital intermediaries.
Digital intermediaries include everything from Facebook and Twitter to Pornhub and XVideos to search engines, Substack, cloud hosting companies, dating apps, video chat platforms, web payment processors such as PayPal and Stripe, and any other website or app that serves as a conduit for content, communication, or trade.
The goal of both FOSTA and the NCOSE lawsuits is to change the Section 230 paradigm when it comes to sex. The strategy involves first recasting sex trafficking. Legally, this is prostitution that involves minors and/or force, fraud, or coercion; in the popular imagination, it necessarily involves violence, abduction, and rape. The crusaders want to make it mean essentially any activity that involves sex work, even between consenting adults, or any sexual activity involving minors, even if there is no commercialization and even if intermediaries facilitating its exposure have no reasonable expectation of knowing about it.
At its core is the idea that sex work can never just be work; it's always exploitation. Hawkins says as much: "That sex buyers must pay to sexually access the bodies of others demonstrates that the sex in prostitution is unwanted by those being paid. Payment, whether in cash or by other things of value, is the leverage used to abrogate the lack of authentic sexual desire of those in the sex trade."
Additionally, any third party profiting from sex—no matter how indirect or inconsequential—counts as exploitation. That's the crux of the Twitter lawsuit: NCOSE's argument is that because Twitter runs ads alongside all content, it profited from the tweet sharing footage of teens engaged in sex acts, and therefore it violated federal law against child sex trafficking.
Under this logic, it's incredibly risky—reputationally, legally, and financially—for online intermediaries to allow any sort of sexualized business or content. No company wants a reputation for supporting exploitation, sex trafficking, and child abuse. And hosting sex-business transactions risks FOSTA-enabled lawsuits and abandonment by credit card companies and banks.
In other words, these groups have gone after online sex work and pornography by making it difficult, if not impossible, for sexually oriented businesses to process payments and collect money for services rendered—if they can create accounts at all. These tactics threaten the entire porn industry and the livelihoods of thousands of sex workers. Online sex work is, after all, work: If you can't collect a paycheck or bill your clients, you can't do your job.
more at
The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet (reason.com)
Dubbed "tube sites," Pornhub and its various peers began to dominate web traffic generally and porn consumption specifically. These sites trod on porn's established business model, but for savvy sex workers the tube site network could provide a way to break into the business or reach audiences directly, without the porn industry's usual middlemen. To monetize one's presence in the early days took some creativity, but tube sites would eventually offer content partnerships that allowed people to get paid directly for their videos. Their competitors, such as cam sites and clip stores, made the process of charging money and getting paid even smoother.
The result? For the first time, people with a truly diverse array of body types, looks, races, ethnicities, sexualities, gender identities, and kinks had direct access to the tools of porn production and distribution. In the past, porn had catered to a much more narrow range of tastes, with predictable results. Now audiences could access all sorts of content that defied conventional notions of who and what was deserving of lust. On sites like Pornhub and the microblogging platform Tumblr, outside-the-mainstream content thrived.
And then, one day, it was gone.
In December 2020, without warning, Pornhub removed all videos posted by unverified users—a massive cache of content encompassing anything not posted by formal content partners or members of the platform's official model program. More than 10 million videos were suspended, and unverified users were banned from uploading or downloading new videos.
It was more than a disruption to the site. The unannounced disappearing of so many videos was "a huge cultural loss," says Ashley, a transgender sex worker and civil rights activist with a robust presence on social media and in offline organizing. (At Ashley's request, we're identifying her by first name only.) Ashley volunteers with the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) Behind Bars, a group dedicated to helping incarcerated sex workers. She recently helped spearhead a campaign protesting financial discrimination against sex workers and LGBTQ content creators. Unverified videos, Ashley says, are "inclusive, just by definition, of all the queer content that people felt unsafe with being directly affiliated with."
The Pornhub purge came about two years after Tumblr's ban on any content depicting sex acts, and preceded a similar announcement in summer 2021 from OnlyFans, a subscription content site popularized by sex workers. OnlyFans would later reverse this edict, but the fate of adult content on the site remains uncertain.
Then, in September 2021, the first user-uploaded porn site—Xtube, founded in 2006 and now owned by the same parent company as Pornhub—shut down entirely.
Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent FederalCourt Decisions
Demand for online porn hasn't weakened, at least not according to web traffic numbers. Nor do there seem to be fewer people willing to create and post it; it's not uncommon to hear sex workers complain about the glut of adult content creators these days.
Nonetheless, it's a financially precarious, and perhaps even dangerous, time to be in the business of online porn. And one of the biggest reasons why is that a constellation of activist groups, rooted in deeply conservative opposition to virtually any depiction of sexuality in the public sphere, have put considerable pressure on the middlemen who keep online porn in business. In some cases, that pressure has led to the creation of onerous new laws; in others, it has been aided by support from powerful figures in business and government. These groups have repeatedly sought to conflate the existence of consensual commercial sex and porn production with the prospect of forced sexual exploitation, often with lurid statistics about exploited minors that don't stand up to scrutiny.
Although these groups say their aim is merely to rid the web of abuse, it's clear that their true goal is to eliminate the vast majority of adult sexual content from the web through a combination of legal pressure tactics, lobbying for new laws, and political intimidation. It's a campaign for a sex-free web. Rather than help vulnerable women, these efforts threaten to make life worse for the very people they claim to want to help—while simultaneously stifling internet expression more broadly.
From 'Morality' to 'Exploitation'
Few organizations have done as much to try to squelch online porn as the group that for most of its life was known as Morality in Media. The group was founded in 1962 to fight countercultural influences, especially those with sexually explicit material. In 1969, for example, it went after underground newspapers for "obscenities" and "push[ing] drug usage as the 'in' thing." In 1971, its target was "titillating ads in the U.S. mails," along with "smut in media"—including "nudie, homosexual, sado-masochistic and teen-age sex books"—that might be "inciting our nation's youth to violence, perversion, promiscuity, drug experimentation, hatred and tastelessness."
By the early '80s, the group was bemoaning adult bookstores, soap operas, and MTV. "Really and truly, soap operas are destroying the family's moral base," its president said in 1984. In the '90s, it railed against daytime talk shows and sitcoms depicting sex outside marriage. The specific nature of the threat was always shifting, but the core crusade was always about mass media portrayals of sexual activity that didn't align with traditional values.
In 2015, the group rebranded as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). Since then, the internet and tech companies have become its primary targets. Search engines, social media, online classified ads, digital marketplaces, and streaming video services have all found themselves under fire, along with online pornography platforms like Pornhub and OnlyFans.
Today, the group tends to trade the language of "decency" and morality for feminist-tinged talk of consent, objectification, violence against women, and sex trafficking. Pornhub "normalizes themes of racism, incest, and violence against women," NCOSE said in a 2019 press release. HBO profits "from sexual objectification, exploitation, and violence," it declared in 2016. NCOSE describes its work broadly as "exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sex abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking, and the public health harms of pornography."
Underneath it all, though, NCOSE is still the same old musty conservative values group aimed at eradicating sexuality in the public sphere. It cloaks that under a mantle of saving the children, and it uses intimidation and legal pressure to get what it wants.
In recent years, the group's annual "dirty dozen" list has condemned the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue for "sending a message that women's bodies are for public consumption," Cosmopolitan magazine for "hypersexualized cover models," Seattle coffee stands for having scantily clad baristas, Amazon Prime Video for showing "simulated sex scenes," and Netflix for featuring "gratuitous amounts of nudity."
"When Netflix, a highly influential platform with over 200 million users across the globe, hosts sexually explicit content like 'Cuties,' 'Big Mouth,' and 'Sex Education,' it deserves to be called out for profiting from sexually exploitative content," says NCOSE CEO Dawn Hawkins. "Sexual exploitation is not entertainment."
NCOSE is one of a handful of influential groups intent on recasting a wide range of sexual content and activities as "exploitation." It's joined by groups such as Exodus Cry, which was born out of an evangelical Christian church in Kansas City and bills itself as foe of "commercial sexual exploitation"; the Justice Defense Fund, a lobbying and litigation group founded by the anti-porn activist Laila Mickelwait; and Demand Abolition, an anti–sex work group founded by the oil heiress and Clinton-era ambassador Swanee Hunt.
Though they speak the language of feminism, these groups are steeped in the spirit of conservative purity culture—an evangelical ethos popularized in the 1980s and '90s. Purity culture hinges on abstinence rituals like virginity pledges, chastity rings, and father-daughter "purity balls." It's predicated on the notion that sexual activity should be relegated to monogamous and heterosexual married couples, and it preaches strict gender roles, female modesty, and total abstinence from premarital sex. It often rests on the idea that promiscuity not only destroys a woman's value as a partner but her emotional stability and self-worth.
Some prominent anti-porn activists spring directly from this world. Exodus Cry founder Benjamin Nolot has distanced himself and his organization from the group's evangelical roots, but he became known for giving talks like "contending for purity in a pornified world," in which he defines sexual immorality as "all sexual activity outside of the marriage covenant between one man and one woman." Others come from a radical feminist background that eschews gender norms and embraces queerness yet sounds strangely like its religious right counterpart when it comes to sex work. In both frameworks, women who participate in porn are ruined. Men who watch porn are damaged. Porn "kills love" and threatens the well-being of American women and families.
A shared goal of these groups is to remake the internet as a sex-free zone by casting a vast swath of nontraditional sexual activity as "sexual exploitation" or "human trafficking," especially if it involves the transfer of money, even indirectly. "Any content that turns people into public sexual commodities has no place on the Internet or in society," Hawkins says.
This strategy has had remarkable success, earning an audience and acclaim among reporters, politicians, and prominent feminists unlikely to be so kind to a band of moralistic Bible-thumpers denouncing promiscuity and calling sex outside marriage a sin. The purity culture ethos of shame, abstinence, and fallen women still permeates these groups' activism. But it's been repackaged as a bid to protect women and kids from trauma and sexual harm rather than to uphold the sanctity of marriage and biblical womanhood.
A central plank of this strategy is litigation.
In January 2021, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit accusing Twitter of sex trafficking. The basis for this claim is that the social media site temporarily hosted a link to a video, hosted on a separate site, featuring two teenagers engaged in sex acts. The minors had taken the video themselves and shared it with a third party via Snapchat. In August, a judge ruled against Twitter's motion to dismiss the case.
In February 2021, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit against MindGeek, the parent company behind a number of porn sites, including Pornhub. In the suit, which is also ongoing, two Jane Does accuse Pornhub of hosting videos without their consent. And in March, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit against WebGroup Czech Republic, the company behind one of the world's most visited porn platforms, XVideos.
In all of these cases, an underlying kernel of harm is alleged, such as a teen being blackmailed into sending a stranger sex videos or women being duped into appearing in online porn. But rather than target the perpetrators of that harm directly, the NCOSE strategy is to go after platforms that—however briefly or unknowingly—hosted evidence of it taking place.
None of these suits would have a chance at success without the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2018 (FOSTA), a law that NCOSE backed. In addition to making it a federal crime to host content that facilitates prostitution, FOSTA amended the federal statute known as Section 230—which says that individuals and intermediaries online aren't always legally liable for content, interactions, and transactions by clients or users—to make it easier for private citizens and state attorneys general to sue digital intermediaries.
Digital intermediaries include everything from Facebook and Twitter to Pornhub and XVideos to search engines, Substack, cloud hosting companies, dating apps, video chat platforms, web payment processors such as PayPal and Stripe, and any other website or app that serves as a conduit for content, communication, or trade.
The goal of both FOSTA and the NCOSE lawsuits is to change the Section 230 paradigm when it comes to sex. The strategy involves first recasting sex trafficking. Legally, this is prostitution that involves minors and/or force, fraud, or coercion; in the popular imagination, it necessarily involves violence, abduction, and rape. The crusaders want to make it mean essentially any activity that involves sex work, even between consenting adults, or any sexual activity involving minors, even if there is no commercialization and even if intermediaries facilitating its exposure have no reasonable expectation of knowing about it.
At its core is the idea that sex work can never just be work; it's always exploitation. Hawkins says as much: "That sex buyers must pay to sexually access the bodies of others demonstrates that the sex in prostitution is unwanted by those being paid. Payment, whether in cash or by other things of value, is the leverage used to abrogate the lack of authentic sexual desire of those in the sex trade."
Additionally, any third party profiting from sex—no matter how indirect or inconsequential—counts as exploitation. That's the crux of the Twitter lawsuit: NCOSE's argument is that because Twitter runs ads alongside all content, it profited from the tweet sharing footage of teens engaged in sex acts, and therefore it violated federal law against child sex trafficking.
Under this logic, it's incredibly risky—reputationally, legally, and financially—for online intermediaries to allow any sort of sexualized business or content. No company wants a reputation for supporting exploitation, sex trafficking, and child abuse. And hosting sex-business transactions risks FOSTA-enabled lawsuits and abandonment by credit card companies and banks.
In other words, these groups have gone after online sex work and pornography by making it difficult, if not impossible, for sexually oriented businesses to process payments and collect money for services rendered—if they can create accounts at all. These tactics threaten the entire porn industry and the livelihoods of thousands of sex workers. Online sex work is, after all, work: If you can't collect a paycheck or bill your clients, you can't do your job.
more at
The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet (reason.com)
