When a nonconsensual pornographic video is uploaded to a “porn tube” site like PornHub, XVideos, xHamster, or XNXX, the consequences can haunt victims for years.
Too often, these porn tube sites refuse to remove nonconsensual pornography from their websites. Even if they do remove a video, they may allow it to be uploaded again later. The embarrassment or shame that victims feel about these videos can last for the rest of their lives. Victims must live each day wondering what present or future romantic partners, children, employers, or clients will think – or are thinking – if they’ve seen “that video.” Victims may be ridiculed or ostracized. Many victims turn to drugs. Some attempt suicide.
This needs to stop. We aren’t talking here about pornographic actors who are of legal age and decide of their own free will to make pornographic videos for compensation. That practice is legal and as lawyers, we don’t challenge it. We do stand against nonconsensual pornography that porn tube websites feature and profit from.
Some of these videos show the worst types of sexual exploitation – rapes and sexual assaults. Others show videos of underage victims, or of women who were promised that the videos they made would not be published online. Others show videos from secret cameras installed in showers or dressing rooms. Others show “revenge porn” in which a former sexual partner uploads sexual videos to the internet to hurt a former partner. Some videos show women who made a single error in judgment – maybe believing a promise that the video would only be distributed in other countries in DVD format – and then have to spend the rest of their lives haunted by a single mistake. That is not okay.
The legal liability of porn tube sites like PornHub, XVideos, xHamster, or XNXX is not perfectly clear. This is an area of the law that is changing. For years, porn tube companies hid behind the so-called “Communications Decency Act” of 1996, which largely absolved them for liability for videos or images that a user uploaded, but that may not help them anymore. In 2018, Congress amended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to allow certain bad actors (such as Backpage.com) to be held accountable for the sexual exploitation it was enabling and profiting from. See 47 U.S.C. § 230.
Those amendments may also allow victims to hold PornHub, XVideos, xHamster, XNXX, and other websites like them accountable for the nonconsensual videos that those websites are profiting from. The relatively recent Trafficking Victims Protection Act may also make a porn tube site liable if it “knowingly benefits” from hosting nonconsensual pornographic videos. See 18 U.S.C. § 1595.
