"Most recently, these groups have used extremist language and tapped into QAnon sentiment toward child trafficking, so it makes sense that their rhetoric has attracted and mobilized some of the darkest corners of the internet," the Pornhub spokesperson said. "It is disturbing and dangerous, but not the least bit surprising, to see extremists using Nazi paraphernalia, death threats and photos of weapons alongside Exodus Cry's Traffickinghub logo."
All the anti-sex trafficking groups Motherboard contacted for this story condemned the content of the extremist Gab posts, and all forms of violence, but also rejected the notion that their negative portrayal of sex work and pornography could lead to real world violence. In fact, Mickelwait suggested, without any evidence, that the Gab posts could have been created by Pornhub as a way to undermine her campaign to shut the site down. When I asked Mickelwait to comment on the use of Traffickinghub logos and language by neo-Nazis, she directed me to two of her tweets: one from October 2020, which screenshot different posts from another white supremacist group. "For the record, as the founder of the Traffickinghub movement I reject everything about the account creating these horrific hate filled posts misusing the TH hashtag," she wrote. "I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it is actually Pornhub who is behind this to promote a false narrative."In the other tweet on March 17, 2021, she quote-tweeted the images from Gab and wrote, "As the founder of Traffickinghub I aggressively condemn the racist hateful message here. It has no place in this movement. Knowing the dirty tactics of Mindgeek & the extreme racism they promote on Pornhub I would not be surprised if Mindgeek created these accounts to attack.""Most of this propaganda is pretty ordinary visually in terms of online white supremacists, except that the individuals in the propaganda photos are women, and the text is explicitly anti-porn.”
On March 16, a 21-year-old white man went on a shooting spree across three Atlanta massage parlors, murdering eight people; six were Asian women working at the parlors. He blamed his "sex addiction," according to authorities, and saw the women he murdered as "temptations he wanted to eliminate."Do you have experiences to share about anti-trafficking organizations, working at an adult site like Pornhub, or being targeted by anti-porn extremists? We’d love to hear from you. Contact Samantha Cole securely on the messaging app Signal at +6469261726, on Wire @samleecole, or by email: samantha.cole@vice.com
"I saw that interracial couple he had, photographed there, having sex. It just made me sick. I think whites marry with whites, blacks with blacks, Indians with Indians. Orientals with orientals. I threw the magazine down and thought, I'm gonna kill that guy."
He added that aligning with non-extremist organizations is a tactic extremists use to get their messages to the mainstream. In the last month, anti-trafficking groups that want to exclude sex workers from conversations about their own wellbeing have found soapboxes everywhere from the New York Times to the U.S. House of Representatives. After the Atlanta shooting, the Times published an article that suggests the massage parlors that were the targets of the shootings could have been trafficking operations because of their industry, with no proof that they were. The article uncritically cited anti-trafficking organization Polaris Project, as well as faith-based anti-trafficking organization Street Grace, as unbiased sources of information on the sex trade. Both of these groups advocate for the end-demand model."These organizations are simply 501c3-QAnon, hateful propaganda think tanks that put sex worker lives in danger”
The organization used its observations to make great assumptive leaps about what happened inside of the parlors: "Assuming there are at least three people working at each establishment at any given point in time, that is about 500 victimized individuals of the IMI [illicit massage industry] on any given day across Georgia," the report said."At each establishment, a camera was set up for 24 hours on public property on a random day of the week. A total of 456 hours of film was analyzed to count the number of customers that received services at each establishment, including the time they entered and the time they departed. Those who attempted to enter but did not receive services were not counted in the customer count; only those who entered and exited within a time period where it could be reasonably deduced that they received services were counted in the demand totals. The dependent variable is the total customers receiving services within two hour time intervals throughout a 24-hour period."
In the wake of the Atlanta shooting earlier this month, these sex-worker exclusionary anti-trafficking organizations did what they usually do: jump on a tragic news event to gain attention for themselves.
"Exodus Cry condemns racism, acts of violence, and violent rhetoric in all its forms," Benjamin Nolot, CEO and founder of Exodus Cry, told me in an email. "Regarding the recent Atlanta massage parlor shootings, evidence indicates trafficking was happening at one or more of these massage parlors in the past. Whether any of the shooting victims were actively being trafficked is currently unknown, but we believe this situation warrants an investigation."
"It’s important to take threats seriously but realistically," Fisher-Birch said. "I think it’s very concerning that these individuals make violent threats online against trans people, sex workers, and activists. I am more worried that they would commit an act of violence or a crime of opportunity in their own geographic area." Most social media platforms are far from enacting perfect policies against hate speech, including white supremacy. Twitter is notorious for its Nazi problem, and Facebook can't seem to stop disinformation, QAnon, Neo-Confederate and anti-Semitic groups from proliferating. Hate speech itself isn't a crime, but there have been recent attempts at legislating hate speech online, including the “Social Media Hate Speech Accountability Act," and a proposal that would require that platforms make it easier for users to report hate speech. Most of these mainstream platforms already discriminate against sexual speech; none of the focus on hate speech has included protections for sex workers. "Of the bills that I've seen that are about targeting disinformation and hate speech, there's nothing that makes me feel safe about any of those bills whatsoever," D'Adamo said. "At least partially because—if someone saying 'porn is the worst scourge of the Earth, and we need to eliminate the sex industry'—that's never going to get flagged as hate speech."Fascination with saving women from sexual sin in the United States didn't come out of nowhere. We have a long history of tying porn, promiscuity, and purity together to point blame at sex for somehow destroying the country. One could trace it back to Puritanism and book-banning more than 200 years ago, but even in recent memory, the idea that erotic speech threatened the health of society persisted. In the Regan era, it was the idea that porn would make viewers violent toward women, or dismantle the family unit, and therefore needed to be regulated: The 1986 Meese Report, from then-Attorney General Edwin Meese, made claims that porn had harmful effects on people and society, and that the industry was a hotbed for organized crime. Free speech advocates called the report biased and flawed, but conservatives and the religious right latched onto it immediately. The report endorsed individual action from people who opposed porn's "anti-social" effects on society, including protesting at bookstores that sold pornographic material, and making formal complaints to government authorities about materials citizens found “harmful, immoral or objectionable.”“Although there are many members of this society who can and have made affirmative cases for uncommitted sexuality, none of us believes it to be a good thing,” the report said. And it was up to the individual to pressure the State to make laws that would ban porn, or take matters into their own hands."What is surprising is how well organizations [like NCOSE and Exodus Cry] have rebranded themselves, scrubbed the internet of their past hateful rhetoric, and hidden their true agendas to be more publicly acceptable in order to convince legitimate organizations and elected officials to stand beside them," a Pornhub spokesperson said. "However, this does not change the fact that these are extremists whose agenda has always been to abolish adult content and tell consenting adults what they should do." "Dangerous organizations like theirs are the reason sex workers protect their identities with pseudonyms, why online sex workers work hard to protect their location and names, why I caution people to only use a P.O. box, and do not go to pick up packages by themselves and why many of my full-service friends live in fear," Moody told me.Exodus Cry's Facebook post about the Atlanta shooting piously says, "it's important to understand who these victims were," before reducing them to caricatures of the sex-trafficked Asian woman. We know who they were because their loved ones told the world: mothers, grandmothers, daughters, and friends. They worked long hours to provide for their families, who now mourn them. As we've seen from extremist online groups, there are scores of people ready to hate them, profile them, or unfairly call them "trafficked." Unless these anti-sex trafficking nonprofits that try to make them the poster-women of their own agenda start focusing on issues like housing and food instability, fair wages, rights and resources for immigrants and rights for sex workers, they won't be the last victims of senseless vigilante violence. History will just continue to repeat.“If someone saying 'porn is the worst scourge of the Earth, and we need to eliminate the sex industry'—that's never going to get flagged as hate speech”