More than 30 women are suing the company which owns the streaming site Pornhub, alleging exploitation over the use of explicit videos of them.
The women say the videos were uploaded to Pornhub without their consent and have lodged a civil suit in California.
The California lawsuit accuses Mindgeek of running a “criminal enterprise”.
In a statement, Pornhub called the allegations “utterly absurd, completely reckless and categorically false”.
Pornhub is free to use but users can pay a monthly fee for higher-quality video streams and extra content.
Its content is mostly uploaded by its own community and publicly viewable. However, the company has said every video uploaded is reviewed by human moderators.
Pornhub told the BBC: “Pornhub has zero tolerance for illegal content and investigates any complaint or allegation made about content on our platforms.”
It said it had “the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history, which include the banning of uploads from unverified users”.
However, the BBC’s US partner CBS says Pornhub does not require its users to verify the identity or age of those featured in its videos – nor, according to CBS, does it seek to confirm the consent of people who appear in videos posted to the site.
Brown Rudnick LLP, the law firm representing the plaintiffs, says the lawsuit alleges claims under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000.
One of the women in the suit told CBS she was only 17 when her boyfriend coerced her into making a nude video.
The woman, who used the pseudonym Isabella, said the video was later posted on Pornhub without her consent and she only found out about it from a friend.
Pornhub said it “takes every complaint regarding the abuse of its platform seriously, including those of the plaintiffs in this case”.
It added that it did not intend to let the “hyperbolic language in the lawsuit distract from the fact that Pornhub has in place a safety and security policy that surpasses that of any other major platform on the internet”.
Last December, a New York Times investigation accused Pornhub of being “infested” with child-abuse and rape-related videos – claims the site denied.
Pornhub said it received 42 billion site visits in 2019, with 6.83 million videos uploaded, for a combined viewing time of 169 years. It did not say how many moderators it employed.
bbc
