“I should be excited about going to law school, or nervous about the workload, instead I have anxiety and I’m terrified that my colleagues will find the video… I shouldn’t have my nightmare posted online for everyone to see anymore. Videos of a crime shouldn’t be allowed to be monetized.”
This is what one survivor said after attempting to get pornographic videos of her, posted by her sex trafficker, taken off the Internet. She is just one of over 80 survivors of the sex trafficking scheme, Girls Do Porn, who are demanding that Cloudflare, a 2024 Dirty Dozen List target, stop providing services to pornography websites that are hosting videos they were forced/coerced into making (a form of image-based sexual abuse, or IBSA).
Cloudflare provides website infrastructure for some of the most prolific pornography, sex trafficking, and AI-generated image-based sexual abuse websites. They are providing services to dozens of pornography websites that are hosting videos of the abuse these survivors incurred. Even after a judge ruled that the survivors of the GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking operation were entitled to the rights of the pornographic videos, pornography sites hosting the abusive content have refused to take them down.
The Problem with Cloudflare: Explained
Cloudflare provides services to a slew of sexually exploitative sites. The company provides basic web framework for some of the largest sex buyer “review boards,” where sex buyers can rate and review prostituted women like products.
They provide content delivery network services (CDN is what allows a website’s content to be delivered quickly to its users) to many of these well-known sex buyer review boards and prostitution sites including: RubMaps, Chaturbate, TNA Board, The Erotic Review, AdultSearch, Seeking, yesbackpage, and OnlyFans. (Hyperlinks do NOT lead to the exploitative websites referenced. The links are directed to the BuiltWith data showing the service providers like Cloudflare.)
The egregious comments left by sex buyers on these websites display an intention to deprive prostituted women of their bodily autonomy. Furthermore, the dehumanizing nature of these comments show how sex buyers view all women: as nothing more than a sum of their parts.
‼️This blog contains real quotes from real sex buyers‼️
— National Center on Sexual Exploitation (@NCOSE) November 15, 2024
👉The blog part of a series exposing the myths from the pro-prostitution lobby. These quotes demonstrate that their claim that decriminalizing will inhibit sex trafficking is FALSE.
In these quotes, sex buyers…
Cloudflare also provides domain name system services (DNS helps your computer find the IP address of a website) for the prostitution website known as Skip the Games.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) services, which act like a security guard for a website, are another type of web infrastructure provided by Cloudflare to many of the prostitution sites listed above.
The link between prostitution and sex trafficking is undeniable. While there is a lot of public discourse around legalizing or fully decriminalizing prostitution, doing so would fuel the commercial sex marketplace and leave many more people at risk for being sex trafficked.
Moreover, the Internet is the most common way that sex traffickers access their victims, and with websites like these continuing to function at such advanced levels, this problem will only intensify. Cloudflare has the ability to prevent these websites from fueling sexual exploitation, but they are neglecting to do so.
Cloudflare could cut ties with problematic sites that violate its terms of service or facilitate illegal activities, which they have done before when Cloudflare terminated CDN services for decentralized social media platform Switter, a platform for prostitution, in April 2018.
So why does Cloudflare continue to provide services to known sex buyer review boards and other prostitution sites – including ones known for sex trafficking?
Additionally, with AI-generated image-based sexual abuse and child sexual abuse material running rampant on the Internet, Cloudflare shoulders a huge portion of blame. The company provides CDN, DNS, and WAF services for some of the most prolific “nudifying” and “deepfake” pornography websites, including Clothoff.io, Undress.love, Undress.app, Nudify.online, Deepnude.cc, and provides DNS services for Undressai.com.
Cloudflare responded to our letter in April notifying them that they were on the Dirty Dozen List, but failed to fully address our concerns.
What Impact Does This Have?
Cloudflare boasts about being the “world’s fastest content delivery network.” They are able to reach 95% of the world’s Internet-connected population within approximately 50 milliseconds. But what they don’t want to brag about is the ways in which they are servicing sexual exploiters on the Internet.
Cloudflare provides essential components that keep these exploitative sites operational. In fact, none of them could function at their current scale without Cloudflare.
Given the wide reach that Cloudflare so proudly touts it has in the online world, if they stopped using their services to enable sexual exploitation, this would surely save millions from being victimized.
