A campaigner fighting for a pornography website to be shut down - after she found dozens of examples of rape,torture and child abuse - has documented her Erin Brockovich-style battle in a new book.
Laila Mickelwait's book Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse,Rape and Sex Trafficking is published this week and documents her five year campaign to force the Canadian pornography website out of business.
Anti-trafficker Mickelwait,who was raised in Southern California,first became aware of how content could be uploaded to the site without scrutiny in 2020,after reading about a missing 15-year-old in 2019 who was found after she was spotted in content on the site.
Mickelwait,41,who was working for a not-for-profit sexual exploitation charity at the time,decided to test how easy it was to upload videos and found that everything she posted - including blank videos - went live without checks by the adult industry video site,which has 5.8 billion monthly visitors.
Mickelwait says she'll stop at nothing to get answers from Pornhub,which,she says,has more than 300 victims worldwide who've come forward saying they didn't consent to content posted on the site
Eventually Pornhub deleted,80 per cent of their content,wiping out 10 million videos after removing videos by those who refused to be verified.
Breaking down in the video trailer for her book about her investigation,she says victims were 'so happy and so relieved because for the first time in years,their rape videos were off Pornhub'.
So far,Pornhub has made some efforts to improve the site's moderation,using AI and more moderators. In September,an age verification process will be implemented for videos being uploaded.
However,Mickelwait,who has been researching and combating the injustice of sex trafficking for over 15 years,says she won't stop until she has answers from Pornhub on how such content was allowed to be uploaded - and says she want the company's owners and executives to finally face justice via prosecutions.
Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse,Rape and Sex Trafficking is published July 23rd by Penguin Random House
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