FSC: New Yorker’s Praise of Antiporn Extremists is Disgraceful
We are shocked but not surprised by the New Yorker’s misleading and misguided attack on Pornhub. Rather than engage in a nuanced look at the challenges of moderation on an internet comprised of limitless user-generated content — from Twitter to Snapchat to Facebook — journalist Sheelah Kolhatkar set her sites almost exclusively on one adult website, adopting the rhetoric of religious extremists.
Most concerning is Kolhatkar’s willingness to praise and excuse the anti-sex work, anti-LGBTQ+ evangelical voices that drive her article. Throughout the piece, Kolhatkar acknowledges the faith-based roots of the crusade, only to swat away concerns about their campaign against marginalized communities as irrelevant.
Early on in a conversation with Kolhatkar, we suggested that the claims of faith-based anti-porn groups should be viewed with suspicion. Kolhatkar told us she’d heard those concerns from others, but didn’t see the relevance. After all, if their information and issues raised were valid, what did it matter if they believed that all pornography should be banned? The issue, we explained, was that they are not honest in their goals, nor honest in their claims.
Her lack of interest in questioning their narrative had a predictable effect. Despite the fact that Kolhatkar had already been reporting the article for about two months when we spoke — much of it spent speaking with Laila Micklewait and others — she still didn’t know the basics of content moderation on Pornhub. She expressed disbelief when we explained that all content on Pornhub requires identification and model releases to be submitted before uploaded videos are published. She believed, incorrectly, that she could upload illegal content onto the platform with no verification — a regular talking point of the antiporn groups.
As a result, Kolhkatkar’s reporting regurgitates the misinformation and elevates the stigma and shame of the antiporn groups, carrying water for bigots who believe that sex workers should be eliminated and that all adult content should be made illegal. The New Yorker article isn’t just an attack on Pornhub, it’s an attack on the workers and creators who make up the adult industry. By inaccurately portraying sexual speech online as a wild west where there are no rules, and the adult industry as uniquely culpable, she tees up a ball for the censors to hit — decimating the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of adult creators in the process.
We are outraged that the New Yorker, instead of defending the value of free expression against the attacks of religious censors, would instead lean in on a culture war sex panic, furthering the agenda of extremist special interest groups without regard to the truth.