Last week, the United Nations (UN) published a statement from two UN “experts,” Reem Alsalem, the “Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences” and Ana Brian Nougrères, a “Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy,” claiming adult platforms like those operated by Pornhub parent company Aylo Holdings are facilitating the “large-scale sexual exploitation of women and girls.”
Among other things, the statement asserted that “systems that facilitate and profit from the sexual exploitation of women and girls cannot merely be regulated at the margins, they must be fundamentally confronted.”
Today, the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) issued its strongly worded response to the UN statement, calling the UN’s proclamation “as disingenuous as it is ignorant.”
“Late last week, two United Nations volunteers (known as Special Rapporteurs) issued a press release calling for the prosecution of adult platforms that allow user-generated content,” FSC noted. “They accuse adult platforms, without evidence, of human rights violations and complicity in criminal activity. The authors, Reem Alsalem and Ana Brian Nougrères, claim – despite clear and overwhelming evidence to the contrary – that adult platforms do not verify age or consent of the content creators who upload or publish there.”
In rebutting the UN statement, FSC said that unlike social media platforms or messaging services, “adult platforms such as Aylo – which was accused by name in the press release – extensively verify age and consent of those appearing on their sites.”
“Adult companies have led the online tech sector in the fight against exploitation, developing best-in-class tools for identifying, blocking and reporting illegal content,” FSC added. “The attack on adult platforms is ideological, not factual.”
FSC also noted that in a previous report, “Ms. Alsalem called for both production and possession of explicit content to criminalized, calling it “torture” and a violation of human dignity.”
“Explicitly disregarding direct requests by sex workers for respect and dignity, she called the difference between sex work and trafficking ‘artificial’ and insisted on using the term ‘prostituted women’ to describe them,” FSC added. “Perhaps that explains why Ms. Alsalem and Ms. Nougrères’s statement focuses entirely on adult industry platforms such as Aylo rather than the mainstream social networks where the vast majority of non-consensual intimate images (NCII), child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other illegal content is actually uploaded and distributed. This isn’t an honest effort to protect victims, it’s a pretext for punishing the legal, regulated industry that facilitates the autonomy and prosperity sex workers.”
FSC closed its statement by saying the organization is “appalled that the United Nations continues to platform and advance paternalist, pro-censorship policies that disenfranchise and imperil the lives of sex workers under the guise of fighting exploitation,” adding that FSC will “continue to fight for policies grounded in evidence, dignity, and the actual voices of sex workers.”
You can read the full FSC statement here. The UN statement to which the FSC responded is available here.
