Review
Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking
(Thesis, $39.99, 304 pages)

Takedown is the autobiographical story of one woman’s battle to expose and shutdown one of the internet’s most visited websites, Pornhub. The Canadian-owned pornography aggregator is the 10th most visited website on the internet, infested with child sexual abuse, rape videos, and revenge-porn. Laila Mickelwait, an anti-human trafficking activist and mother of two, set her sights on the highly profitable purveyor of filth by targeting both the executives of the company and the credit card companies that monetized the abuse of the videos’ victims.

Mickelwait’s story begins with her efforts to reveal sex trafficking (coerced sex for money) through investigative research made public through her social media campaign, which in turn attracted new sources of material. Some revealed dark web mirror sites where illegal videos were shared anonymously. There was a whole community of pedophiles using Pornhub to access material with tags for easier searches that included UA Sex (meaning underage sex) and Not18. The Pornhub algorithms would feed users more of that material if someone happened upon it. Many featured illegal pornographic videos of underage girls being raped.

Mickelwait, a Christian who required prayer to make it through her journey to “takedown” Pornhub, described the website not as pornography but “a crime scene” with “a gold mine of incriminating comments from Pornhub’s own mouth.”

A former employee at MindGeek, the Montreal-based company that owns Pornhub that now goes by the name Aylo, approached the author to share horror stories about the company’s practices. He was one of 30 moderators who worked eight-hour shifts reviewing user-uploaded videos to make a guess about whether the participants were of legal age and had consented to have sex acts recorded and shared with a global audience. They were “tasked with viewing a thousand or more user-uploaded videos per shift,” often without sound and at higher viewing speeds. Needless to say, this was ineffective.

The source admitted that it was near-impossible to determine whether subjects consented, either as willing participants in the sex acts or for the material to be shared with the website. They erred on the side of assuming the recordings were consensual. Likewise with the difficult judgement calls on whether girls in the videos were of legal age. There is “more money” for the company if questionably sourced videos are approved. For the record, Aylo rejects the anonymous source’s claims.

Mickelwait tested Pornhub’s procedures for uploading videos, which did not require her to verify her identity or provide proof of details about the video. There were 11 million videos when she uploaded her innocuous video, which she assumed were subject to the same ease for uploading.

Among the uploads were videos that pushed the envelope even if they were consensual and legally produced. “Young girl tricked” suggests that consent was not obtained and that the female in the video might not be of legal age. Mickelwait describes in detail one seemingly intoxicated teen crawling naked on the floor, with a bloody gash on her back. The comments below the video describe what various viewers would like to do with that vulnerable, naked girl.

When Mickelwait created a Twitter campaign targeting Pornhub, she was contacted by dozens of young women who did not consent to recordings of their sexual activity being shared online. Even more troubling, the vast majority of them had trouble getting Pornhub to take the content off their website, but even if the website agreed, many videos were downloaded by other pornographic websites and users for recirculation and perpetual use.

In one horrifying story, a woman from Guatemala said videos of her being sexually abused when she was 9-15 years old had surfaced on Pornhub. In another victim’s case, Nicole, would successfully petition the company to remove sexual content featuring her that she had no consented to be uploaded, only to have the same material appear days later. This process repeated itself over and over again.

Mickelwait discovers that Pornhub censors the word “rape” and other terms that might red flag a crime being committed, indicating that they know what is occurring on their website. MindGeek/Aylo cannot claim ignorance. Their website is designed to evade authorities.

Mickelwait worked with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof who wrote a sensational expose “The Children of Pornhub” in December 2020 detailing some of the more troubling cases of illicit video uploads, the inaction of MindGeek in the face of complaints of victims, and the complicity of credit card companies in processing Pornhub memberships.

Kristof’s column resulted in Pornhub removing nearly 80 per cent of its content, some 30 million images and videos. The major credit card companies withdrew their services. Several women sued Aylo. The company reached an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to minimize the damage, which included admitting they profited from sex-trafficking and paying a $1.8 million fine. More importantly for potential future victims, Pornhub amended its video uploading process.

This book is not for the faint of heart, with its graphic accounts of the horrific abuse suffered by women and children in the making of pornographic videos. There is graphic depictions of vulnerable girls and language that would make a pirate blush.

Mickelwait’s campaign against Pornhub did not result in shutting the website down but it did end up with forcing it to change some of its policies to lessen the probability that videos uploaded to its website are legitimately consensual and featuring men and women of legal age. Mickelwait’s efforts were heroic and consequential, so it might be churlish to note that the victory was against just one pornographic website out of untold numbers of them. It may be a small victory but for the first time, a mainstream pornography website was held accountable.

Still, there was no penalty for those who committed the rapes and child abuse, no sanction for those who filmed these crimes, and no legal consequences for the consumers of this illegal content. Mickelwait closes the book with a letter to readers in which she vows to keep up the fight “to shut down Pornhub.”

More troubling yet is Mickelwait’s insistence that she is not opposed to consensual pornography, “as long as it is lawful and not harming another person.” She seems uninterested in the well-established fact that many consumers of pornography eventually search out more degrading sexual content to satisfy their escalating interests in debauchery as they become numb to the corrupting effects of legal, supposedly legitimate porn.

Sarah Stilton studied philosophy and the classics at Harvard and Oxford and has worked in British and European politics for more than 20 years.