Porn in court
Aylo is a Canadian company which is reputed to be the biggest publisher of pornography on the internet. It owns Pornhub and several other well known porn brands. Lest we forget, in the UK and elsewhere Pornhub chose not to take any meaningful steps to keep children off its sites until the law made that mandatory e.g. by requiring age verification.
I have clashed with Aylo several times over the years but we’ve never ended up in a court room. However, while Aylo is now a defendant in multiple cases, probably the most spectacular is also the most recent.
On 20th January Rhodes et al v Aylo Holdings and others was filed in Federal Court in Pennsylvania. The principal plaintiff is Alexander Rhodes and his organization which is described as
a secular peer-support website for persons affected by pornography addiction
The suit consists of 208 pages of dense text so I will not try to provide a precis although I am sure Chat GPT will happily oblige if you ask nicely.
However, to give you something of the flavour, here are the main parts of the opening two paragraphs of the plaintiffs’ deposition
The world’s largest pornography company conspired with others to intimidate and silence its targets through an illegal conspiracy that has turned Alexander Rhodes’ life into a living nightmare.
While falsely presenting itself as a sex positive and legal adult media business, Pornhub is a criminal racketeering operation…..
There’s a long list of defendants and the press release the plaintiff put out summarises the major allegations being made against them
…. pornography industry associates have targeted the plaintiffs for over a decade, including filing false law enforcement and administrative reports, posting thousands of defamatory statements online, conducting intrusive opposition research, relaying disinformation to journalists, staging hoaxes, and astroturfing Wikipedia pages. The complaint claims that there are at least 70 identified victims of similar conduct.
The complaint further asserts that the pornography industry has engaged in a long-running operation to suppress scientific research, influence academics, publish industry-aligned papers to manufacture the appearance of controversy, pressure professional organizations, and obstruct governmental regulation such as age verification.
(note for the uninitiaed “astroturfing” refers to creating the appearance of a groundswell of grassroots support for something, a campaign, a candidate etc. whereas it is truly the product of an orchestrated, synthetic and often undeclared inititiative by an interested party).
David Koblinsky, the lawyer leading for the plaintiff put it like this
"The pornography industry is borrowing from the 1950s tobacco industry playbook. We hope this case triggers governmental oversight and, where warranted, criminal investigations.”
According to Gemini here are two of several other cases currently engaging Aylo’s attention and their lawyers’ time:
The Utah Division of Consumer Protection and the Federal Trade Commission
Resulted in a US$ 5 million penalty with an additional US$10 million suspended payment pending compliance:
“to resolve allegations of deceptive practices. The agencies alleged Aylo failed to sufficiently block Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and non-consensual material (NCM) while claiming to do so.”
Department of Justice (DOJ) Agreement (2023–Ongoing)
Under a Deferred Prosecution Agreement, Aylo agreed to pay $1.8 million in fines and additional compensation to victims of "GirlsDoPorn."
The company is currently under a three-year period of independent monitoring to assess its content moderation processes. It acknowledged that it was profiting from income which it knew or should have known originated from sex trafficking.