Almost a year after a civil court judge ruled that the owners of Girls Do Porn were guilty of coercing 22 women into having sex on camera, Reddit still hosted communities that doxed the real names of women in the videos and reposted non-consensual imagery from Girls Do Porn. The subreddits were active for months despite some of the content there being reported to Reddit by at least one person, and were only removed yesterday, after Motherboard reached out to Reddit for comment.
In October 2019, a week after federal investigators charged Girls Do Porn with federal counts of sex trafficking, Reddit banned the biggest Girls Do Porn subreddit at nearly 99,000 subscribers. But since then, more subreddits and user accounts have surfaced to repost videos and links to content. Earlier this month, the male performer the Girls Do Porn videos pled guilty to federal charges of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. The lead owner of the company is on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
Videos by VICE
Reddit removed one of the newer popular subreddits devoted to Girls Do Porn content on Monday, following Motherboard’s request for comment. That subreddit had 20,000 subscribers and was made four months ago. It also removed another subreddit devoted to doxing and sharing links to videos of one of the women who appeared in Girls Do Porn. That subreddit, which started in November 2019, included her legal first and last name as the name of the subreddit. Threads within the forum included her name in the titles.
Charles DeBarber, a cyber intelligence professional and victim advocate whose client was the subject of that subreddit, contacted the platform to have the content removed on her behalf. The original post within each of the threads was deleted, replaced by a notice: “Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit’s Legal Operations team. This content was removed in response to a copyright claim by a third party.” But in almost all of these threads, comments remained up, including links to torrents of her Girls Do Porn video.
Since her name was on the subreddit in association with Girls Do Porn, the forum’s very existence doxed this woman.
A Reddit spokesperson told Motherboard: “Reddit’s site-wide policies prohibit involuntary pornography, as well as any content that threatens, harasses, or bullies. The subreddits in question have been banned in accordance with these policies.
“Additionally, we have dedicated teams that enforce our site-wide policies, proactively go after bad actors on the site, and create engineering solutions to detect and prevent them in the future. We continue to strengthen the measures we have in place to prevent or limit the impact of policy-breaking activity, which combine technology tools with human review and moderation.”
DeBarber said that targets of non-consensual imagery are “at a disadvantage” when it comes to content removal, even if they have ownership of their own content—a problem that’s common among adult content creators whose content is stolen and reposted, as well as victims of non-consensual imagery and harassment.
Once non-consensual images are posted online, it becomes incredibly difficult and time-consuming to get them taken down. Reporting an entire subreddit dedicated to exposing your personal information is often a complicated process that’s different for every platform, and going from website to website, reporting individual content one piece at a time, can be re-traumatizing for survivors of image-based sexual abuse. Many of the women who were lied to by Girls Do Porn are still trying to regain control of their images and their lives, years later.
This story has been updated with comment from Reddit.
