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Takedown
Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking
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The gripping, true story of one woman’s battle to expose and shut down a criminal online porn empire.
Pornhub was the 10th most visited site on the Internet, often praised as a progressive champion of women. Then one day, an activist discovered a secret they had been keeping from the world for over a decade: it was infested with child sexual abuse and rape videos.
Now for the first time, anti-trafficking expert and mother of two Laila Mickelwait tells the story of her battle against Pornhub’s billionaire executives and the credit card companies who helped them monetize the abuse of countless victims—some as young as three years old. Readers will follow her from her first horrifying discovery of criminal content on Pornhub to closed-door meetings with credit card executives, White House and Justice Department senior officials, a powerful hedge-fund manager and more. Through insider accounts from Pornhub moderators and executives, you’ll meet the world’s first online porn tycoon, AKA “the Zuckerberg of porn,” along with Pornhub’s top brass (known internally as “The Bro Club”) who operate in secrecy.
The culmination of years of activism, Takedown is the true, never before told story of how Mickelwait mobilized a movement of two million people and together they accomplished "the biggest takedown of content in Internet history." (Financial Times)
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
July 23, 2024 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780593542026
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780593542026
- File size: 5903 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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July 1, 2024
An expos� on the popular pornography site, awash in a myriad of sexual abuse and child trafficking allegations. Mickelwait, a leading anti-sex trafficking activist and founder of the Justice Defense Fund, explores the rise in exploitative abuse by the adult entertainment industry. Her impassioned report focuses on her discovery that the 10th-most-visited website in the world, Pornhub, was monetizing homemade, pay-to-download, advertisement-supported sexually abusive content--and manipulatively cloaking that material even after its "dirty secret" was exposed to the media. The author delivers the bulk of her chronologically structured investigation via dramatically lucid language and verbatim commentary from content moderators, survivors, and former employees of MindGeek, the company that owned Pornhub until 2023. Throughout the book, Mickelwait provides damning evidence of Pornhub's incentivization of sexual crime. "I realize Pornhub's servers are potentially the largest collection of child pornography and sexual crime in North America, if not the world," she writes. The author chronicles how she wrote an accusatory series of social media posts and media articles urging the executives of MindGeek, specifically CEO Feras Antoon, to be held accountable, which sparked vicious retaliation efforts. "They have no choice but to attack with lies, and assaults on character and credibility to slow the truth about them from spreading," she writes. "One thing is clear: MindGeek plays dirty, and this is going to be a messy fight." As Mickelwait delved further into the darker realms of the internet, more shady characters emerged, and she provides disturbingly vivid portraits of the wrongdoers. Thankfully, her initiative has made significant progress in court, but she is clear that the fight against sexual crime will continue. The author is a dedicated journalist, and she effectively sounds the alarm for tighter controls over "crime scene" porn sites. A significant report on the impact of sexual crime in adult entertainment.COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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