Amanda J

She was 13, a straight-A student, when she sent her boyfriend one video. At her new school, a stranger sent her a link. It was on Pornhub, titled "13 year old brunette shows off for the camera." Too scared to tell her mom, she messaged Pornhub pretending to be her mother. Then it came back up. One copy hit 2.7 million views. In the video below, she tells it herself to the Canadian parliament. Wait for the 2.7 million views, and what the comments under that video said. Her mom was a strict Catholic, a single mother of six. Serena Fleites didn't want to bring this home. So she typed into Pornhub's own report form: "Hey, this is my daughter, she's only 14 now, this is child pornography, please take this down." They took a week or two to answer. Then another two weeks to actually remove it. She had been told Pornhub had a system. Once a video was flagged as child porn, it could never be uploaded again. "But of course that wasn't true, because a week after it's been taken down, it had been re-uploaded again." By then the video had gone around her school and the schools nearby. Strangers sent it to her. People threatened to send it to her family. She started ditching class, took drugs, dropped out and ended up homeless. "I ended up trying to kill myself many times. I ended up in mental hospitals." The copies kept collecting views. She had a hormone disorder: at 13 and 14 she looked 9 or 10. One upload sat at 2.7 million views under "hundreds of comments saying 'this is definitely child pornography, that girl can't be any more than 14, 13.'" Pornhub still wouldn't take it down. When they finally answered, she says, they hassled her for more details. A child had to prove she was the child in her own video. "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 and over again." Even then, every takedown dragged on, "which would gain hundreds of thousands more views." She told her family two days before the New York Times article came out. A 13-year-old flagged it. Hundreds of strangers flagged it. Pornhub asked for her ID. So was Pornhub just a slow website drowning in reports, or did it make money off every single week it made a child wait?