Survivors of sexual abuse and their global advocates are calling upon Google to overhaul their search engine algorithms to stop promoting violent pornography.
A coalition of victims of sexual abuse and their advocates from all over the world have come together to demand that Google reexamine the ways its search engines lead its users to porn sites that promote sexual violence, as this type of content influences sex trafficking and child sexual abuse. The campaign was launched after increased scrutiny over how role porn sites are turning a profit off their crimes.
According to the Christian Post, a group of 104 sexual abuse survivors and victims advocates from 13 countries, including the Washington, D.C.-based National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) have come together to call upon Google CEO Sundar Pichai to "improve its search engine policies to no longer promote access to sexual violence, incest, racist or other abusive pornography" through a letter.
Advocacy group NCOSE's latest action comes after the New York Times published a revelatory story on how Pornhub's rival XVideos allows users to post videos that showcase child sexual abuse and how Google search results in fact directs users to those videos.
The NYT's Nicholas Kristof wrote, "Women and girls, and men and boys, are sexually assaulted or secretly filmed, and then video is posted on a major website like XVideos that draws traffic through search engines. While the initial video assault may be brief, the attack on dignity becomes interminable."
NCOSE Vice President and director of the International Center on Sexual Exploitation Haley McNamara, agrees, saying, "The reality is Google helps people find and watch rape videos, sex trafficking, and even child sexual abuse. Google rightly doesn't produce 'how-to' articles in top searches on suicide, yet it allows searches for non-consensual materials to go straight to the source: pornography websites that are infested with illegal and non-consensual content."
McNamara argues that Google, tech giant that it is, has a "foundational role in driving traffic to these pornographic websites," which for years has "operated with impunity, and perpetuated horrible injustices to survivors of sex trafficking, rape, child sexual abuse, and many others by refusing to take down illegal or non-consensually shared material from their sites."
The letter and call to action to the tech giant is a result of a collaboration by Dismantle Pornhub, the International Centre on Sexual Exploitation of the U.K., Collective Shout from Australia, Defend Dignity in Canada, and #Traffickinghub in the U.S.. These groups are collectively demanding that Google reevaluate the ways their search engines drive traffic to these questionable websites that promote sexual abuse, especially to minors.
Earlier this week, NCOSE CEO Dawn Hawkins criticized the tech giant, calling Google the "gatekeeper of the internet" and reiterating its responsibility for preventing content on child sexual abuse, rape, incest, race discrimination, and abuse in the pornograpy industry. Credit card companies have already taken a stand and it is time for the tech giant to do the same. Google has not yet responded to the letter as of writing.
