Reddit banned r/girlsdoporn, a popular subreddit for reposting Girls Do Porn clips, gifs, and links last week, following federal criminal charges against the production company.
Earlier this month, the owners and key employees of adult film production company Girls Do Porn were charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion. They’re also on trial in San Diego civil court, accused by 22 of the women who appeared in the films of fraud, emotional distress damages, and misappropriation of their likenesses.
Videos by VICE
The subreddit for unofficial Girls Do Porn fandom started in 2013 and had nearly 99,000 subscribers. Reddit was monitoring r/girlsdoporn for about a week—and after Motherboard inquired about the status of the subreddit, the platform took action and banned it altogether.
Before the ban, r/girlsdoporn moderators tried to take the fate of the sub into their own hands, by removing almost all of the posts and announcing that the sub would go on hiatus until further notice.
“It’s come to our attention that GDP is currently having a dispute with some of their former models,” one of the subreddit’s moderators wrote in a closed thread announcing the change earlier this month. “Because we don’t know which models are involved, out of the 600+ girls they’ve shot, we’ve temporarily removed GDP related posts until this is resolved.”
But days later, Reddit shut it down entirely.
There are potentially hundreds of women who experienced abuses from Girls Do Porn, according to the plaintiffs’ legal team in the civil case, as well as more women who have come forward to Motherboard following our coverage. How these videos spread online without their knowledge or consent—on massive porn sites like Pornhub and YouPorn, as well as on mainstream forums like r/girlsdoporn—played a huge part in how the women in them were harassed and doxxed.
Many say that their lives were completely changed when friends and family found the videos, spiraling into depression or suicidal thoughts. Some uprooted their entire lives following being outed by people online, on websites like recently-defunct PornWikiLeaks.
It’s not every day that the topic of a subreddit falls under FBI investigation. But as we saw with forums devoted to non-consensual deepfakes porn—which sites like Reddit, Twitter and Discord took action against—deplatforming these communities can help minimize the harm they inflict on their targets.
