Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, Laila Mickelwait. They discuss her ongoing efforts against the largest adult content platform in the world, their shady dealings with credit card companies, top-down refusal of proper moderation, potential safeguards which would benefit performers, and how anonymity fuels psychopathy on the internet. Laila Mickelwait is the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and the founder of the global #Traffickinghub movement supported by millions around the world. She has been combating the crime of sex trafficking since 2006 and is a leading expert in the field. The Traffickinghub movement that Laila continues to lead is a decentralized global effort to hold Pornhub accountable for enabling and profiting from child abuse, sex trafficking, rape, and the criminal exploitation of countless victims. Traffickinghub has earned hundreds of millions of views on social media, and the petition to shut down Pornhub has been signed by over 2.3 million people from every country in the world. 600 organizations have participated in the effort and the impact of the movement has been covered globally in thousands of media pieces. This episode was recorded on August 20th, 2024 | Links | For Laila Mickewait: Purchase Laila’s book “Takedown: Inside The Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Trafficking” at Takedownbook.com 100% of author proceeds are donated to the Justice Defense Fund to support the cause https://Takedownbook.com Learn more about Laila’s organization the Justice Defense Fund at Justicedefensefund.org Sign the Traffickinghub petition at Traffickinghubpetition.com On X https://x.com/lailamickelwait On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lailamickelwait/?hl=en
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
So I had the great privilege today of doing a live discussion with Lila Micklewaite, who is one of the most compelling and the bravest people I've ever met. And I don't say that lightly. Lila has been waging a one-woman war against
I would say, although she has plenty of allies now, against the Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic purveyors of online porn, particularly at the site known as the Pornhub community. I'm not a big fan of pornography in general, and certainly not a fan of Pornhub, and I've been sharing Lila's tweets in particular for years,
for about as long as she's been making them, I believe, about four years. Anyways, she's mounted a very effective campaign. And so we took a little voyage to the heart of darkness today, partly sociologically, and technologically investigating the rampant spread of the pornography that's perhaps destroying our culture. That might be the case.
Certainly the facilitation of the behavior of the psychopathic criminals who generate and distribute that content is a civilization-threatening phenomenon. occurrence and enterprise. We also talked a lot personally because I was very curious about why Lila became interested in this and why she decided to devote herself to it so effectively.
And that part of the conversation was also extremely interesting. She was tangled up and attracted by the Hollywood fame machine and came to understand its essential soul-devouring shallowness, that pursuit of narcissistic self-gratification. And we talked about how her personal experiences tied into her sociological and political pursuits.
It was a very interesting live conversation up here in Fairview, Alberta, my hometown. So join us for a voyage to the heart of darkness. Laila, nice to meet you. I've been following your work online for quite a while. My wife has been following you as well, and I believe my daughter, and we understand what you're up to, at least to some degree.
You've taken on the biggest porn network in the world, the so-called... Pornhub community, it's all sweetness and light on the Pornhub community. There's people sharing their hobbies and interests, I suppose. And so why don't you explain to everybody just exactly what you're doing, I guess how long you've been doing it, why you're doing it, and what exactly is transpiring?
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Chapter 2: How has Laila Mickelwait been combating Pornhub?
Sure, absolutely. Well, I've been combating the injustice of sex trafficking now for the last 18 years, and about A little over 10 years ago, I began investigating the intersection between the big porn industry and sex trafficking and other forms of criminal sexual abuse like child sexual exploitation. And there is a big porn industry, just like there's big tobacco, there's big pharma.
There's big porn, and it's dominated by one company primarily. It's a Canadian company, isn't it? Well, their headquarters is in Canada, in Montreal, actually. And this company is called, or was called until last year, MindGeek. And now we named themselves ILO in an attempt to rebrand. But they own a virtual monopoly on the global porn industry. Their most popular porn site is Pornhub.
Chapter 3: What are the statistics and impact of Pornhub?
And most people would have heard that name before because You know, when in 2020, when this movement to hold Pornhub accountable for globally distributing and monetizing countless videos of child sexual abuse, rape, sex trafficking, and other forms of non-consensual violence. criminal image-based sexual abuse.
When this began in 2020, Pornhub was the largest and most popular porn site in the world. They had, at the height of 2020 and December, this was kind of the height of this website, they had 170 million visits per day. They had 62 billion visits to that site that year. And they had enough videos being uploaded, 6.8 million videos uploaded to the site.
That would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to back. So researchers in 2020 named Pornhub the third most influential tech company on global society, just behind Facebook and Google. And it was the fifth most, according to the CEO of Pornhub. In December of 2020, it was the fifth most trafficked website in the world. Not just porn site, website.
Trafficked?
Yes, meaning visits.
Okay, yes, sorry, of course.
And so this is a massive website, but it's one of many websites. So MindGeek owns, they estimate, about 80% of the world's most popular porn sites and brands, including most of the world's most popular tube sites. And to understand this— Tube sites. Tube sites. So these are the YouTubes of porn.
So Pornhub is the YouTube of porn, meaning this is user-generated content where anybody can become a pornographer. If you have an iPhone, if you have a camera in the back of a car, in a hotel room, in a park, wherever, you can film a sex act and you can upload it to YouTube. the porn tube sites, Pornhub being the most popular.
So what happened was, I had been investigating this, my antennas were up, I was paying attention to this intersection between the pornography industry, sex trafficking, and child sexual abuse. At the end of 2019, I began to hear some stories in the media that were very concerning, that really arrested my attention.
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Chapter 4: What are the policies of Pornhub regarding moderating content?
That's the rebrand. Right. And so intentional decision. And I mean, over the course of the last four years, you know, as this kind of started to go viral on social media, a petition that I started in early 2020 to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable. And today we have two point three million people. Signatures from every country in the world.
And as this was spreading, victims were coming forward and whistleblowers and insiders from the company were coming forward. And they taught me not just how this content was getting uploaded, but why it was getting uploaded. And again, it's the business model of free user-generated porn. Yeah.
Why do you think they're not more careful in drawing a line between what's legal and acceptable, at least legally, and what's illegal and sadistic and criminal? Is there something about... Okay, so here's part of the reason I'm asking this question. So I spent a lot of time studying the perceptions and actions of very, very pathological people.
And one of the things that is interesting about serial sexual killers, for example, is that their behavior tends to accelerate across time. And there's a very specific reason for this. So... Sex has an intrinsically rewarding nature, but that the nature of anything that's rewarding can be heightened by novelty.
So because novelty itself, if it's in the right dose, is also gives you a dopaminergic kick, sexual anticipation and sexual pleasure increases. produce a dopaminergic kick, but novelty heightens that. Okay, so what that tends to mean, especially if you're overdoing it, let's say, is that you want to stay on the novelty edge, right?
So what you see with serial killers, for example, who have a sexually sadistic twist is that the sadistic element in their crime accelerates across time as they search for that edge to stay where things are maximally gratifying. And so
There's reasonable evidence that the same thing applies to pornography use online, is that maybe it starts out with relatively vanilla displays, but then it progresses to more and more graphic displays, and then past graphic, there's kinky and past kinky. There's violent and past violent. There's violent and kinky, and that's not as far as it goes. And so you can also see this culturally.
You know, Theodore Dalrymple, who's a very interesting British essayist, made a lot of this when he was talking about how porn invaded our culture, that the borders were, what would you say, moved bit by bit, really starting in the 1920s. He identified a famous case. who was the novelist, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was banned as a pornographic novel in Great Britain.
And it was quite sexually graphic, especially for the time. And that ban was overthrown. And he thought of that as a, although Dale Rimple is a free speech advocate, he thought of that, the victory of, I can't remember who the author was, actually quite a renowned author, the victory of, for his novel as the entry point of the pornographication of the culture, okay, but
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Chapter 5: How are victims of sexual abuse affected by Pornhub's policies?
Do you know what the proportion is by any chance?
No, I don't know that exact proportion. I do know it's still boys primarily that are primarily being exposed, but girls as well are consuming this kind of content at very young ages as well.
Yeah, well, curiosity is going to drive that to some degree. There's a great book by the Google engineers called A Billion Wicked Thoughts. Do you know that book? No, I don't. And so, yeah, and so, you know, we're in a situation right now where the typical 13-year-old boy can see more beautiful nude woman than any man ever saw in history, right?
Incredibly powerful, possibly irresistible stimulus package. And we also don't know exactly what that's doing to the relationships between young men and young women. sexually and otherwise, right?
There is increasing evidence, especially in countries like Japan and South Korea, although the curves, the transformation curves seem to be playing out the same way in the rest of the West, except delayed. There's a tremendously high rate of virginity now in Japan. I think it's something like 30% of Japanese young people, 30 and under, have never had any sexual encounter whatsoever.
The relationship scene is fragmenting in those countries. The birth rate has absolutely plummeted. And we have no idea what the connection is between that and the very straightforward and simple sexual gratification that's available online. We also have no idea how it is that young people's sexual preferences are trained as a consequence of their exposure to online pornography.
And so is it cataclysmic? Probably, probably. It's an insanely powerful technology. And I've been thinking about this too, you know, is that we misapprehend what's happening because it's easy to think that the women on Pornhub, for example, who are participating, the men as well, are participating. just women, but they're not women in a way.
They're women machine hybrids because no woman can be in a million rooms at the same time. And you can think about that also with regard to sites like OnlyFans, is the women have been transformed into images that can be propagated everywhere. And that's an insane technological revolution. And it's also very possible for young women to monetize their beauty.
And tempting for them to do that because, well, a small proportion of them can make a very large amount of money and in a manner that appears easy and also that draws a lot of attention. And so if you have a narcissistic tilt or if you've been isolated and are lonely and need attention, then that's a hell of a way to get it. So it's really a bad scene.
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Chapter 6: What actions have been taken against Pornhub and its executives?
But I've gone on a journey of discovery over the last four years, kind of like peeling back the onion layers of this corporation and understanding how it works and what I call the deep complicity of Pornhub. I'll give you an example. Pornhub owns most of the world's most popular tube sites. I told you how many videos are uploaded to Pornhub every year.
They made a decision to only hire 30 moderators at their office in Cyprus to be reviewing this content, 10 moderators working at a time. They were reprimanded if they viewed less than 700 videos. per eight-hour shift. Some of them were watching up to 2,000 videos per eight-hour shift, just clicking through those videos with the sound off. All the while, they knew they weren't verifying ID or age.
And this was a guessing game. They were playing Russian roulette with real people's lives, with victims' lives. And that wasn't just for Pornhub. So that was all of the PornTube sites. They had 10. moderating. Compare that to Facebook's 15,000. They still don't have enough moderators even at Facebook. But make that comparison. That was an intentional decision.
And those moderators, I spoke to them for dozens of hours. I consider some of them friends at this point because we've spent so much time together discussing how this worked. And they said that their job was more to allow as much content to go through as possible. So Content is king for the porn tube sites.
They have to have massive amounts of content in order to drive those Google searches, in order to drive the traffic and sell the advertising.
Why do they need more content if there's 169 years? I mean, this is one of the things that I find mysterious about the porn business as a whole. I don't understand how it can be monetized because... the internet is absolutely flooded with porn and it's free. So like, where's, what's the business?
Well, it's the advertising. So mostly, you know, they're making money off of premium subscriptions so that you could buy, you know, so you can pay $9.99 or $19.99 a month and you can watch porn or you can watch the real rape ad-free. They were selling pay-to-download content, which was a small portion of the content on Pornhub.
But there's many examples of victims even in that pay-to-download content. There was a 12-year-old boy in Alabama, and he was drugged, and he was overpowered, and he was raped in 23 videos by a man named Rocky Shea Franklin. and that was pay to download content where he entered into a profit-sharing relationship with Pornhub to split that 35%, 65% for Rocky, 35% for Pornhub.
They were selling those videos Police reached out multiple times to Pornhub demanding those videos be removed, and they were ignored. They stayed on the site for seven months, hundreds of thousands of views. They put an intentional download button on every single piece of content on Pornhub. Again, an intentional policy decision to place that.
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Chapter 7: How does anonymity contribute to online exploitation?
I just kind of got new numbers yesterday that they have been forced to take down 91% of that website. They went from 56%. million pieces of content down to 5.2 million. They've lost Visa, MasterCard, and Discover, have cut them off completely after a huge multi-year battle for that to happen.
So the credit card companies were the ones that were enabling them to monetize this illegal content, including trafficking and child sexual abuse, and they were getting a cut of each transaction.
Was that your doing?
Well, it was the doing of many people who've joined together. I mean, we've had 600 organizations participate in what's called trafficking hub movement. Lawyers, journalists, most of all survivors who've come forward to courageously tell their stories.
And how did you get the credit card companies on board?
Well, it was a huge battle. I mean, some of these conversations, behind the scenes conversations with the credit card executives are verbatim recounted in my book, Takedown. And you can kind of go on that journey of having to
battle with them to show them evidence after evidence after evidence that they were actually, in the words of a federal judge, so Visa is currently being sued by these survivors for their relationship with Pornhub. A federal judge in California, Cormac Carmi, he said, Visa gave Pornhub the very tool through which to complete the crime of knowingly benefiting from child trafficking.
Finally, the New York Times did an explosive article at the end of 2020 two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nicholas Kristof, that kind of sent shockwaves around the world. The pressure was on, and they actually ended up announcing they were cutting ties with Pornhub at that point.
But we found out that they actually snuck back two weeks later to the advertising arm behind the scenes to continue monetizing this content with Pornhub, and it was another two-year battle to finally get them to cut off Pornhub once and for all. And that's kind of how it happened. Thanks to lawsuits, thanks to public pressure. And Bill Ackman actually was a huge help.
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