Yesterday, award winning New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof published a hard-hitting piece on the prevalence of child pornography on Pornhub.
Last year, the New York Times did some groundbreaking in-depth investigative reporting on the prevalence of child pornography on public internet sites like Google, Bing, and Facebook. Kristof’s latest exposé reveals how sites like Pornhub are promoting child pornography for profit.
None of this should be surprising given the reluctance of the tech industry to address the problem of child sex abuse material on their sites. Just last month, the world-leading Canadian Centre for Child Protection released this report on the inability of the public to even report child sex abuse material on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat, not to mention Pornhub.
With calls for change in Congress, which is currently considering the EARN IT! Act along with an outright repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the need for accountability and a measurable response is finally crystalized for both the public and political leaders.
Although a powerful coalition of organizations from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the Council on Foreign Relations to Human Rights Watch, Brookings, the ACLU and Americans for Prosperity continue to vigorously oppose any regulation of Big Tech (who are often their largest donors), the people and the politic are finally engaged in addressing online child exploitation. For our clients and others like them, meaningful change cannot come soon enough.