Hawley bill would enable victims to sue porn sites for hosting their images
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley introduced legislation Wednesday aimed at enabling victims of revenge porn, trafficking and sexual coercion to sue websites posting images and videos without their consent.
The bill comes in response to a recent article by New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof scrutinizing Pornhub, a Canadian-based porn site that functions like the equivalent of YouTube for porn and receives 3.5 billion visits a month.
In his column, Kristof documented multiple cases of underage girls, who were victims of sexual assaults, whose images were posted to the porn site.
Kristof wrote that the girls’ abusers were arrested for the assaults, but that the website escaped legal responsibility for sharing the images that were posted by the sites’ users.
Hawley’s bill would criminalize the knowing distribution of forced or coerced sex acts, require websites to create takedown procedures to ensure victims can promptly have their images removed and empower victims to sue websites for knowingly hosting privacy-invading images and videos.
“Sites like Pornhub routinely escape responsibility for facilitating abuse, trafficking, and exploitation, making millions for themselves in the process,” Hawley said in a news release.
“Meanwhile, the victims of this abuse have little recourse against these powerful companies, who thrive on spreading depraved content. Serious criminal penalties are needed to crack down on these tech executives who think they are above the law.”
Hawley, a former Missouri attorney general, has been an outspoken critic of the tech industry since joining the Senate two years ago.
The legislation has three co-sponsors: Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis and New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan.
This story was originally published December 9, 2020 at 11:44 AM.
