Tube Sites Are Scrubbing Girls Do Porn Videos After Pornhub Lawsuit

Some of the world's biggest porn sites are finally removing videos produced by sex trafficking operation Girls Do Porn after 40 victims of that operation sued Pornhub this week for at least $1 million each. 

Xvideos.com, a porn tube site much like Pornhub that hosts videos anyone can upload, has removed most of its easy-to-find Girls Do Porn videos in the last 48 hours. According to internet traffic tracking website Alexa, Xvideos is the 94th most popular website globally in the past 90 days

Prior to this change, dozens of Girls Do Porn videos regularly appeared on the front page of the site, where they collected millions of views over the last several years. The site's search function returned almost 400,000 results for the term "Girls Do Porn," though not all of them were actually Girls Do Porn videos. Searching for "Girls Do Porn" on Xvideos at the moment does not return any results. 

As was the case when Motherboard reported on Pornhub's failure to remove Girls Do Porn videos earlier this year, a few Girls Do Porn videos are still hosted on Xvideos, and can be found via different search terms, and in some cases, the site's recommendations of videos to watch. 

XNXX.com, which is operated by the same company that operates Xvideos, similarly removed Girls Do Porn videos. 

Spankbang.com, another porn tube site, has also removed many of the Girls Do Porn videos it hosted in the past two days, and currently returns zero results when searching for the term. Disabling certain search terms is a method for moderating content on sites, and a tactic Pornhub and others have used for Girls Do Porn, as well as terms like deepfakes.  

Earlier this year, Motherboard contacted all of these websites during our reporting on Pornhub's faulty moderation methods. Hundreds of Girls Do Porn videos remained on Pornhub even as 22 women took Girls Do Porn to court, and after the FBI indicted Girls Do Porn for federal counts of sex trafficking. Those sites never responded to our request for comment at the time, and did not immediately respond to requests for comment today. 

These porn tube sites hosted and surfaced Girls Do Porn videos even after Pornhub started removing Girls Do Porn videos this year. Pornhub made a huge policy shift and stopped letting unverified users upload videos to the site last week. After Visa and Mastercard stopped accepting payments for Pornhub last week—posing a serious financial blow to both its parent company Mindgeek and performers who use the site—it removed all unverified content, removing the vast majority of videos on Pornhub. 

It is only in the last couple of days, after 40 women sued Pornhub, that these sites finally started removing those videos. Brian Holm, one of the lawyers representing the 40 women against Pornhub, told Motherboard that his team has not filed a complaint against these tube sites or made contact with them recently.