Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, has admitted to hosting adult videos featuring women who were coerced into performing sex acts by a production company, according to a recent CNN report.
Aylo will pay a fine of $1.8 million and compensate the sex trafficking victims as part of a deferred prosecution agreement reached with federal prosecutors. The agreement states that Aylo, which pleaded not guilty to engaging in unlawful monetary transactions involving sex trafficking proceeds, will face monitoring for three years. If the company complies with the terms of the agreement, the charges against it will be dropped.
According to CNN, between 2017 and 2019, Aylo accepted payment from a production company to stream pornographic content, knowing that some videos featured women who did not give their consent for the content to be posted online.
Despite receiving takedown requests from several women in 2016 and being aware of a federal lawsuit against the production company in 2017, Aylo failed to follow through with all the requests and did not independently verify consent, according to court documents.
Even after Aylo removed the production company's videos from Pornhub in 2019, some were reposted by other users and remained online.
Pornhub was among three adult websites to be added by the European Union to a list of firms asked to follow stringent regulations under its new online content rules. The new EU rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) require companies to conduct risk management, undergo external and independent auditing, and share data with authorities and researchers, a Reuters report said.
