As Mike was talking, he was telling you about some of the other victims. I'm one of the people who ended up homeless, ended up dropping out of school, ended up on drugs, completely detached from my family. I ended up trying to kill myself many times. I ended up in mental hospitals. There were instances where the video would have literally 2.7 million views, and it would still be on Pornhub despite hundreds of comments saying, “Oh, this is definitely child pornography. That girl can't be any more than 14 or 13.” And yet Pornhub still wouldn't take it down, even when I messaged them multiple times. It would take forever, and then when I did get a response, they would hassle me for all these other details. I would have to go through the whole process of sending them pictures of me with my face next to my ID, over and over again, to prove that, yes, that video is child pornography. Even after I proved all that stuff, it would still take a while for them to take it down, which would gain hundreds of thousands more views.
Like Mike said, they optimize that. The titles would always be something like “Pre-teen”, “Young Teen”, “Fourteen”, “Thirteen”. They would always list an age or an age category in the actual title as well as in the tags. That was actually something you could search on Pornhub before they made this whole big wash of the videos deleting a huge amount of them.
It still affects me. I have anxiety to this day. I had always been a very bubbly, open, friendly person. I'm still friendly and I'm still a nice person, but I'm not so bubbly anymore. I don't go up and introduce myself to people. I don't really have many friends. I've distanced myself from everyone. I've spent and still spend more time with my dogs than I do with actual humans, because just being around other people now causes me anxiety, due to what happened when I was experiencing the most backlash from when the video ended up on Pornhub. Guys from school would literally follow me home from school harassing me the whole way to get me to do sexual acts with them, or to get me to make videos with them, or send them more content. They'd tell me, “Well, it's already on there. Why did you share it with him if you can't share it with us? Obviously you don't care. You must have posted it to the site yourself.” They were saying all these things, and then in addition to that, they were trying to blackmail me, saying that they would send it to my mother, send it to the rest of my family. It caused this huge buildup of anxiety and depression in me, which caused me to turn to drugs to try to forget about it, to turn to suicide to try to end it.
Even to this day, it's still hard talking about it and dealing with it, because even after The New York Times came out...once Pornhub did that whole deletion of a bunch of videos, I still had a lot of comments. They wouldn't be sent directly to me because I “privated” and changed the names on most of my social media accounts. People would comment in other articles or in discussions on my Twitter account. They would drop my name in there, saying I was responsible for ruining their lives because they could no longer watch their favourite videos. And then there would be people who actually did find my social media accounts, who, even after I changed my name, changed my profile pictures, changed everything about my profile so that it would be harder to find, and put my accounts on private, would still send me a message and try to send me a friend request like, “Oh, I saw your videos. Your body is really nice.” I was 13, 14, in those videos.
It still affects me even to this day, even after everything they said they were doing to fix it.