“The Children of Pornhub” (NYT, Nicholas Kristof, December 4) shows what a great newspaper can do once the hated dictator is almost gone. The journalist reports on various searches that he did on a porn site.
(But maybe Facebook is the real source of porn depicting teenagers? From a Guardian article:
In the last three years, Facebook self-reported 84m instances of child sexual abuse material. During that same period, the independent, third-party Internet Watch Foundation reported 118 incidents on Pornhub.
)
Not sure if you’re trying to say the article is wasted time, but the point the reporter made is he easily found a LOT more bad stuff than the IWF appeared to. This article caused Visa and MasterCard to come down hard on PH’s parent company, and also caused them to take down about 60% of their content that had come from unverified sources.
It seems really beneficial that this reporter wasn’t distracted by Trump antics.
Steve: I don’t know enough about porn to say whether the story is important. But presumably the situation highlighted in December 2020 was not new in December 2020. So if the story is, in fact, important, it shows what Americans lost by having a media obsessed with Donald Trump for roughly 5 years.
Videos with an under-age Traci Lords having sex are still a Google search away.
Kristof’s article is exploitation journalism. He goes into gory detail, includimg precise search terms, under the guise of moral outrage. This is like Ronan Farrow discovering the casting couch.
Perhaps related: with the NYT and Kristof in particular, you always have to look for the backstory. And here’s one part of it:
Fashion Mogul Peter Nygard Indicted on Sex Trafficking, Racketeering Charges: SDNY
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/fashion-mogul-peter-nygard-indicted-on-federal-sex-trafficking-racketeering-charges-sdny/2781947/
“Several plaintiffs in the suit said they were 14 or 15 years old when Nygard gave them alcohol or drugs and then raped them.”
He’s actually Finnish-Canadian: “Nygård”
He’s “finnish” now, that’s for sure. “Nygård is said to have dated Anna Nicole Smith from 1998 to 2001.”