“I wouldn’t be able to defend this in court”
[MONTREAL — September 13, 2023]
Sound Investigations releases undercover footage of Pornhub technical product manager and early employee, Mike Farley. Speaking to an undercover journalist, Farley describes what he calls a “loophole” in the Pornhub age and consent verification process where Pornhub does not verify the identities of user-uploaded videos that don’t show faces. Farley admits that rapists and traffickers exploit this loophole to “make a lot of money.”
At-a-glance:
Farley: “How are you going to tell me who’s in that video if the girl’s not showing her face?”
Farley: “That wouldn’t hold in court.”
Farley: “That would be the loophole that I always, like, I look at that, and I’m like, ‘That’s stupid,’ but everybody is just kind of rolling with it.”
Journalist: “Why do they roll with it? Why don’t they say something?”
Farley: “Because it costs money. It would be counterintuitive to the business.”
Farley: “We’ve brought it up to the CPO [chief product officer]. We’ve brought it up to the CLO [chief legal officer], and they’re both telling us it’s all good. And the CPO is especially telling us like, “F*ck off. It’s all good. Stop. Like, shut up.’”
Farley: “Using my f*cking head, this is f*cking ret*rded. I wouldn’t be able to defend this in court.”
Journalist: “What if the government was to find out about this loophole. What would they do?”
Farley: “I don’t know. They’re not going to do sh*t. They’ll do nothing.”
Journalist: “Why?”
Farley: “Because they’re dumb. They don’t know sh*t. Because they’re not qualified to identify the loophole.”
Farley: “They’re like, ‘It’s all good. I’m not going to get caught. It’s fine.’”
Pornhub is the most trafficked pornography website and one of the most trafficked websites overall in the world, according to Similarweb, a web traffic analyzer. Pornhub is commonly called a “tube site,” allowing the general public to upload videos. Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, now rebranding as Aylo, owns many big-name porn sites and studios across North America. News reports and lawsuits have claimed Pornhub is complicit in abusers uploading illegal videos, and Pornhub has publicly claimed to have cleaned up its site, following heightened scrutiny from a popular New York Times piece by Nicholas Kristof.
Pornhub continues to allow anyone to upload pornographic videos, as long as the person uploading shows an ID such as a driver’s license. However, Farley describes a major “loophole:” these supposedly verified uploaders can upload videos of people without showing their faces, “which is very common,” and Pornhub does not verify these videos contain consenting adults. These uploaders can then monetize these videos to gain a share of Pornhub’s ad revenue.
When Sound Investigations’ journalist asked if rapists use Pornhub’s loophole, Farley gave a resounding, “Of course. Of course.” When asked about human traffickers, Farley replied, “To make money? Of course.”
Farley says he and his direct boss, Ramsey Belmaaza, have brought up this loophole to officers of the company, including Matt Kilicci, but the chief product officer has told him to “shut up.” Farley notes that his boss and he recorded a meeting with Pornhub’s chief product officer and chief legal officer to show they tried to warn about this scandal, “if ever sh*t hits the fan.”
The Canadian government has scrutinized MindGeek in the past, but Farley claims the government is incapable of finding problems with his company. While Farley worries over this Pornhub verification loophole, he takes comfort in the fact that government regulators “are dumb. They don’t know sh*t. Because they’re not qualified to identify the loophole.”
Farley presents an obvious solution to the loophole but says Pornhub’s profits come first. “You shouldn’t have content up that you can’t identify the person… They would lose a lot of money… They’re like, ‘It’s all good. I’m not going to get caught. It’s fine.’”
18 U.S.C. § 2257 and 2257A, adopted in 1988, requires producers of pornography to verify the age of every performer. Failing to produce records of age verification is a criminal offense in the United States.
Mike Farley LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-farley-21b187110/
Mike Farley LinkedIn archived: https://archive.is/YUTec
Pornhub Exec on Sex Abuse Victim: “We Weren’t Taking It Seriously”
[MONTREAL — September 20]
Sound Investigations releases PART 2 of its undercover footage of MindGeek employees. MindGeek, currently rebranding to Aylo, is the porn giant most known for its most trafficked tubesite, Pornhub. Dillon Rice, a senior scriptwriter for many of MindGeek’s studios and sites such as TransAngels, and Mike Farley, one of Pornhub’s first employees and a current Pornhub product manager, detail MindGeek’s moderation failures that have allowed nonconsensual content to spread on Pornhub, from not having enough content reviewers to fake IDs.
At-a-glance:
Rice: “The system is so slow and they don’t have enough moderators that it stays up for long enough that people can get mad and sue them, and I think that’s what happens.”
Rice: “How do you get somebody to prove that they’re above age because if they can get a fake ID.”
Farley: “We don’t have consent of that person, and we’re running ads. As a business, we’re monetizing content that we don’t know where this comes from, we don’t know who is on that video, we don’t know the age of the person on that video… So, we weren’t very compliant.”
Rice: “You also have this entire division of paysites that are professional studios. We have all our legal paperwork, 2257s… Just use that content. But they [Pornhub] don’t want to. It’s competition.”
Rice: “They made so much money, and they were like top of the world, but they fumbled so hard because they didn’t take any of that money and reinvest it into moderation or like quality of the site. They just kind of gave it all to executives, and then they just made a shit ton of profit.”
Journalist: “Do you think that [The New York Times editorial scandal] would ever happen again?”
Farley: “Yes, it could. Why not?”
Journalist: “Aren’t you guys covered now?”
Farley: “Yeah, for the most part. But not 100%.”
Journalist: “But, why?”
Farley: “Why what?”
Journalist: “Why not 100%?”
Farley: “I don’t know. Because there’s always things. Because of the nature of our industry. We could never be covered 100%.”
Journalist: “Because of like the loophole?”
Farley: “Yeah.”
In December 2020, Nicholas Kristof published an editorial in The New York Times that caused such scandal for Pornhub that the Canadian government responded and victims of sexual crimes filed lawsuits against Pornhub’s giant parent company, MindGeek, now rebranding as Aylo.
While MindGeek fights these lawsuits, two MindGeek employees detail to Sound Investigations’ undercover reporter MindGeek’s negligence and lack of content moderation over Pornhub’s history and then MindGeek’s response to scrutiny after the New York Times piece.
Pornhub product manager Mike Farley admits on undercover camera that, when sex crime victims asked Pornhub to take down nonconsensual videos, Pornhub wasn’t “taking it seriously,” wasn’t legally compliant and “didn’t do our due diligence.” Farley declares directly of his company’s past practices, “We don’t have consent of that person, and we’re running ads.”
MindGeek senior script writer Dillon Rice ascribes a motive to Pornhub’s leaders as he says, “They made so much money, and they were like top of the world, but they fumbled so hard because they didn’t take any of that money and reinvest it into moderation or like quality of the site. They just kind of gave it all to executives, and then they just made a shit ton of profit.”
Despite MindGeek now claiming to have cleaned up Pornhub and to have rectified its content moderation failures, Pornhub still does not verify the consent of everyone in its user-uploaded videos. In Sound Investigations’ previous video, Farley warns that rapists and traffickers use Pornhub to “make a lot of money.”
In Sound Investigations’ video release today, Rice divulges, “The system is so slow, and they don’t have enough moderators…” and also notes that even MindGeek’s ID checks for uploaders may not work with uploaders using so many foreign IDs.
As a script writer for many of MindGeek’s big studios, such as TransAngels, Rice bemoans that Pornhub refuses to use only content from studios that keep 2257s, records that everyone in the pornography videos is of legal age. According to Rice, Pornhub views these videos as “competition” to its user-uploaded content.
Rice’s claims of MindGeek’s executives putting profit over moderation and Farley’s admissions of non-compliance, past and present, are not the only revelations these two have to offer. Sound Investigations will continue to release more undercover videos of more MindGeek and Pornhub secrets from more employees.
This is a developing story. Sound Investigations will be releasing more undercover videos imminently. Contact [email protected] or 404-955-7002.
Sound Investigations is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
Dillon Rice LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillon-514-rice/
Dillon Rice LinkedIn archived: https://archive.is/8bgJu
Mike Farley LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-farley-21b187110/
Mike Farley LinkedIn archived: https://archive.is/YUTec
MindGeek Porn Writer: Ads with “Guys That Look Like 15” Do Best, “Make a Lot of Money”
[MONTREAL – October 19]
Sound Investigations releases new undercover footage of MindGeek senior writer Dillon Rice. MindGeek, currently rebranding to Aylo, is the porn giant most known for its most trafficked tubesite, Pornhub. Dillon Rice, a senior scriptwriter for many of MindGeek’s studios, sites and video advertisements, claims that, “for the ads, the dudes that do the most, like, conversion rates are guys that look like 15,” where “it looks like this little kid is having sex.”
At-a-glance:
Rice: “Essentially, they [MindGeek] have a monopoly.”
Rice: “For the ads, the dudes that do the most, like, conversion rates are guys that look like 15, even though they’re like 20 years old, or like 25. So there’s this one guy named like Jordi. And he just looks like a little kid. And they put him in scenes, so it looks like this little kid is having sex… But it makes a lot of money, so.”
Rice: “We have this guy. His name’s Jimmy Michaels. He looks 13, but they put him in stuff because he looks like that… His ads do well because he looks so young.”
Rice: “It draws predatory women… I think it’s pedophilic men who like seeing young boys, as well.”
Rice: “You could turn them [pedophiles] into whales, purchasing a lot.”
MindGeek, currently rebranding to Aylo, is the porn giant most known for Pornhub. MindGeek operates pornography studios, tubesites (with user-uploaded videos), paysites (with studio-produced videos), an ad network, and more.
Dillon Rice is a senior script writer for MindGeek and helps produce pornographic video advertisements for MindGeek’s sites. Rice shares with Sound Investigations’ undercover journalist that the types of ads he writes for MindGeek that are the most successful are the ads that have adult actors who “look like 15.”
Naming a couple examples, Rice admits that MindGeek puts underage-looking actors in ads specifically because “it makes a lot of money” when an actor looks underage and clarifies, “if you’re just dressing him like a normal person, you can get away with it.”
When the undercover journalist asks Rice who the audience is for these video advertisements, Rice acknowledges that “it’s a lot of young teens” and “a lot of Indians” and that “it draws predatory women” and “pedophilic men who like seeing young boys.”
Upon hearing this, the journalist notes that those drawn to children may have desperate appetites. Rice offers, “You could turn them into whales, purchasing a lot.”
Under 18 U.S. Code § 1470, advertising pornography to minors is illegal.
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