Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm Shane Morris.

If a man exposed himself to children on a street corner, he would be arrested and charged with assault.

However, when essentially the same thing happens online, there are no consequences.

Instead, lawmakers and police assume that if children come

across predatory pornography or strangers attempting to recruit them into porn, it's a problem

of parental supervision. It's well past time to stop treating the internet as a space where

the rules don't apply and to take seriously the sexual exploitation of minors that occurs online. In fact, it's even

more urgent in light of the recent revelations about the world's largest pornography website.

Last month, Nicholas Christoph described in the New York Times internal memos from Pornhub.

These memos were supposed to remain sealed, but were released due to a filing error in an Alabama

federal district court. In these memos, Pornhub employees admitted to knowing of and even joking

about child sexual abuse on their website. In one message from May of 2020, employees at Pornhub

were aware of over 700,000 videos on their site that users had flagged

for depicting rape or assaults on children or for other problems.

One employee wrote,

I hope I never get in trouble for having these vids on my computer, laugh out loud.

Another argued against banning a user who posted an underage video because the user made money.

Yet another memo noted that videos apparently showing child sexual abuse had been viewed 684 million times.

The population of the United States, for reference, is 340 million.

These revelations shed more light on the website's practices and how aware they were of

the problem leading up to Christoph's 2020 expose titled The Children of Pornhub.

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