Traffickinghub History and Evolution
What is Traffickinghub?
Traffickinghub is a global movement to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable for globally distributing and profiting from child abuse, rape, and sex trafficking.
The movement was founded in February 2020 by Laila Mickelwait, who is the Co-Founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund today. The effort was advanced in 2020 in conjunction with Exodus Cry, quickly becoming a global movement of millions of individuals and hundreds of organizations across a broad spectrum of political, faith and non-faith, economic, and ideological backgrounds, uniting together for the single purpose of holding Pornhub accountable.
Today, Laila Mickelwait continues to lead the growing Traffickinghub movement and is determined to do so until its goals are fully accomplished. By design, as a decentralized effort, no single organization has ownership or control over the movement.
Traffickinghub has been supported by hundreds of survivors and anti-trafficking, women’s rights, and child protection organizations around the world. 600+ organizations have joined forces to call for criminal accountability for Pornhub and its parent company. Over 2 million people from every country in the world have signed the Traffickinghub petition, and new activists continue to sign it every day.
Since its founding, Traffickinghub has made enormous progress thanks to the work and participation of all involved. Here is a quick summary:
In 2020, Pornhub was the fifth most-visited website in the world. It was also the largest and most popular porn site, with 56 million pieces of content live on the site, 170 million visits per day, 62 billion visits per year, and enough videos uploaded every 12 months that it would take 169 years if you watched them back-to-back. Pornhub had more site traffic than Amazon and Netflix, and more daily visits than the entire populations of Canada, Australia, and France combined. Researchers named it the 3rd most influential “tech” company on global society, just behind Google and Facebook. 4.6 billion daily ad impressions were helping the site earn hundreds of millions of dollars annually for its parent company, MindGeek.
By the beginning of 2025, thanks to the impact of the Traffickinhub movement, Pornhub was forced to take down 91% of the entire website by removing over 50 million videos and images in what Financial Times called “probably the biggest takedown of content in internet history.”
Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and PayPal cut all ties with the site, leaving them with only cryptocurrency and wire transfers as payment options. The secret majority shareholder of Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek, Bernd Bergmair, was publicly exposed, and the CEO and COO, Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, resigned. Pornhub lost all major advertisers and business partners, including Grant Thornton, Heinz, Unilever, Comcast-Xfinity, Roku, and many others. Meta, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube all permanently shut down Pornhub’s social media accounts, causing them to lose over 14 million followers and subscribers.
Since 2020, Pornhub has faced 25 lawsuits on behalf of nearly 300 victims, including class action lawsuits on behalf of hundreds of thousands of child victims, totaling billions in potential damages.
Valued before Traffickinghub launched at approximately $1.5 billion, MindGeek was sold as a distressed asset in 2023 to a hastily concocted “pop-up” private equity firm called “Ethical” Capital Partners for only $400 million. The company's former owners financed the “sale,” labeled a “pretend” sale by victims' attorneys.The parent company of Pornhub was subsequently renamed from MindGeek to Aylo in an attempt to distance it from its toxic reputation as a peddler of sexual crime. But behind the scenes, at its Montreal headquarters, men who have been with the company well before it was exposed by the Traffickinghub movement—men who enabled the global distribution and monetization of victims' trauma—still occupy executive offices.
Perhaps even more concerning is that the public face of Pornhub's new ownership, a Canadian criminal defense attorney named Solomon Friedman, advertises his firm's experience defending men accused of possessing and distributing filmed child sexual abuse and has spoken on his work defending possessors of child sexual abuse material. He even twice congratulated another attorney who got a man off on a technicality who had been in possession of 7,730 images of child sexual abuse, including images of infants being raped by grown men.
The U.S. Federal Government criminally charged Pornhub and MindGeek/Aylo for the crime of intentionally profiting from the sex trafficking of over 100 victims in California.
BUT WE ARE NOT DONE YET.
Pornhub must be shut down. Its owners and executives must be held accountable to the full extent of the law, and the victims of Pornhub worldwide must be given significant restitution.
Why shut it down and not merely clean it up? Because we must end impunity for corporations and executives who have knowingly enabled, profited from, and globally distributed rape for profit for over nearly two decades, destroying the lives of countless victims. Severe abuses require severe consequences to be a deterrent to future bad actors.
After immense backlash, Pornhub was forced to change its upload process and began requiring the verification of uploaders,' after it faced criminal charges, the site purportedly began to verify the age and consent of the individuals in new images and videos starting September 2024. However, the site owners have refused to remove unverified content uploaded before the policy change in 2024. Therefore, the site is still a crime scene where child abuse and rape are allowed to persist. For example, recent reports mandated by the European Digital Services Act demonstrate that in only 4.5 months, between February 17-June 30, 2024, Pornhub had to remove 3,770 child sexual abuse videos and images and 8,769 rape and nonconsensual videos and images. To this day, Pornhub is still awash with unverified content, including sexual crime.
To prevent these crimes from continuing in the future, the Traffickinghub movement aims to end impunity for Pornhub and its parent company MindGeek/Aylo and to pressure governments and corporations worldwide to implement policies that demand reliable, third-party, age and consent verification for every individual depicted in every video on user-generated pornography websites to ensure this atrocity never happens again.
