Pornhub is essentially a specialised social media site: think of it as YouTube for porn. You’d never guess from its publicity what it actually does for a living: its website describes it as “a global industry-leading information technology firm headquartered in Luxembourg, with offices in Nicosia, London, Montreal, Bucharest and Los Angeles”. Although operating from Canada, MindGeek is legally registered in Luxembourg. These and other reports didn’t seem to get much traction, but because of the reach and prestige of the New York Times, Kristof’s piece did, and suddenly the spotlight turned on MindGeek, the shadowy private company that owns Pornhub (along with a host of other porn sites). With three others, he had been charged with sex trafficking crimes in connection with a scheme to deceive and coerce young women to appear in sex videos. In September, the FBI offered a $10,000 reward for leads to a New Zealander who ran a channel called GirlsDoPorn on Pornhub. In February, the BBC carried a report about a girl who had been raped at the age of 14 and discovered that the video of the attack had been posted to Pornhub. But it isn’t the first time Pornhub has come under scrutiny. Like much of Kristof’s journalism, it’s a striking and disturbing piece.
