NCOSE Urges Google to Cut Ties with Porn Industry
Washington, DC (April 20, 2021) – The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) once again calls on Google to end its role in perpetuating the pornography industry’s exploitation empire, a complicity that the New York Times exposed by outlining Google’s role in directing people to child sexual abuse on pornography website XVideos.
The Times reported: “Just after she turned 14, a man enticed her to engage in sexual play over Skype. He secretly recorded her. A clip, along with her full name, ended up on XVideos, the world’s most-visited pornography site. Google searches helped direct people to this illegal footage of child sexual abuse.” “Google is a pillar of this sleazy ecosystem, for roughly half the traffic reaching XVideos and XNXX appears to come from Google searches.” “A Google search for schoolgirl sex turned up video results of teenagers having sex of all kinds (on a bus, with a ‘stepbrother,’ etc.) on XVideos and XNXX. Most of the people in the videos are probably 18 or over, but who knows?”
“Google’s pivotal role in leading people to child sexual abuse and sexual assault cannot be overstated. As the Times rightly pointed out, search engines like Google and others must stop ‘leading people to rape videos.’ As a gatekeeper for the Internet, Google must take responsibility for preventing the spread of child sexual abuse material, rape, incest, racist and abusive content that is peddled by the pornography industry,” said Dawn Hawkins, CEO of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
NCOSE has had ongoing conversations with Google about search engine results. “Google has changed its algorithms so that scientific terms would yield scientific drawings instead of hardcore pornography images; and it has changed some innocent search terms so that they wouldn’t result in hardcore porn links and images. Google has also changed its search results to stop hardcore pornography websites from showing up if you search ‘child pornography,’ since the Times’ December story about abusive material on Pornhub. Google has shown that they can do the right thing, and Google can and should stop de facto advertising for hardcore pornography sites by removing all pornography images from searches,” Hawkins said.
“Mastercard and PayPal made major moves to confront their associations with the pornography industry’s abuses in recent days and they are to be commended. Google should join those companies and stop driving people to sites that profit from posting crime scenes and illegal images and videos. It is past time for the pornography industry to cease being propped up by mainstream corporations like Google,” Hawkins added.
NCOSE filed a joint class action lawsuit against XVideos on behalf of a child sexual abuse survivor whose images were published and monetized by this online international pornography company.
About National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE)
Founded in 1962, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) is the leading national non-partisan organization exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking and the public health harms of pornography.
