"GirlsDoPorn" : online pornography and politics of responsibility for technology facilitated sexual exploitation

Using force and coercion, pornography company GirlsDoPorn defrauded and trafficked a number of women between 2010 and 2019. In 2020, a U.S court ruled in favour of 22 women who had sued the company directly for damages. However, there remains an ongoing concern about platforms, like Pornhub (owned by tech company “MindGeek”), that host such content. Indeed, there is little consensus about the responsibilities of technology companies to mitigate or prevent harm perpetrated through their platforms, often implicitly reinforced by an assemblage of socio-cultural discourses which responsibilise girls and women instead. In this context, it is not a coincidence that technology companies and online platforms like Pornhub/MindGeek, proved so indifferent to the suffering of women exploited on their site. This chapter builds an account of how the “technological rationality” (Marcuse, 1985; Salter, 2018, p. 256), or the particular logics and values instantiated within technological platforms, intersect with broader cultural logics of postfeminism and popular misogyny in ways that can promote the instrumental attitudes and exploitative relations in the production of image-based abuse