Industry News March 9th

We always follow the latest news affecting the adult entertainment industry. The latest stories involve porn bombing government planning meetings, porn on Facebook, an adult film star purchasing a 4 million dollar castle and more.  Keep reading to see the stories behind these headlines!

Burlington neighborhood Zoom meeting ‘porn bombed’

On January 27th, during a Neighborhood Planning Assembly in Burlington, Vt, an unwelcome participant hacked into the meeting and took control of the screen.  They typed “porn gif” into the search bar, causing a number of graphic images to appear.  This interrupted a portion of the meeting when mayoral candidate Ali Dieng was discussing infrastructure development and homelessness.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” one participant shouted. “Shut the meeting down!” However, it took organizers a minute or so to figure out how to shut down the meeting, and the hacker was much faster, displaying an erotic video for all the participants. 

Eventually, the organizers figured out how to pull the plug. The live Youtube feed to the assembly’s home page was cut and replaced by elevator music. Once the hacker was successfully from the meeting, the assembly resumed, but currently is no longer available to the public.  The video of the first portion of the meeting has since been taken down by the hosting platform.

Porn bombing has become common since many meetings have been moved from in-person to zoom.  Many organizers are still learning the technical skills needed to make meetings secure.  In addition, securing meetings is essentially impossible when the meeting is supposed to be open to the public.  Unlike an in-person public meeting, the anonymity of the internet provides ample opportunity for bad behavior.  

In fact, this wasn’t even the first time this particular planning assembly was porn bombed.  According to Jeff Comstock, a member of the Ward 7 Steering committee, it happened over the summer as well. Comstock said he thinks the issue began when all participants were mistakenly given screen-sharing capabilities, which is how the user was able to project the images and video. He expects tighter security at the next assembly meeting.  

Huge Surge in Porn Uploaded to Facebook, Showing Up in Otherwise Innocent Search Results

When PornHub announced that they were purging all of their unverified uploads following complaints about the site profiting from trafficking, they pointed out that - while an independent commission had found 118 instances of sex trafficking on the site, it was nothing compared to the 85 million instances Facebook had found on their own site during the same 3 year period.  

That does not include explicit material uploaded to Facebook that may have violated Facebook’s policy against pornographic content but wasn’t actually illegal or abusive.  As if to highlight Facebook’s porn problem, there has been a recent explosion in pornographic content on the site.  According to Snopes.com, on January 22, a surge in pornographic videos were uploaded by pages purporting to represent various small businesses. 

Users reported seeing a large number of these NSFW videos showing up in the search bar when they began typing even innocuous phrases.  According to Snopes, screenshots of these search results posted to social media appear to be genuine. They also claim, “this period of time roughly follows a large Facebook outage.”  Snopes concludes their description of the surge by saying, “We do not know how, why, or by whom these videos were uploaded to Facebook, what caused them to show up in search results, or if this incident has any relationship to the outage.” 

Adult Film Star Mia Malkova Buys $4 million Oregon Castle

How do you know you’ve really made it in the porn world? Well, if you’re pornstar Mia Malkova, you buy yourself a stunning castle near Portland Oregon.  The actress, who has a whopping 7.4 million followers on Instagram, has been a huge star within the industry since 2012.  

“Blackberry Castle” is a 13,000-square-foot estate, built-in 2008.  It features  It has five bedrooms and five-and-a-half bathrooms, a two-story library, a European village-style atrium bar, a home theater, a full gym with a climbing wall, a home spa with sauna, and an entertainer’s kitchen.  It sits on six acres, which include a vineyard.

Malkova describes the property as “very eccentric,” saying that her favorite part is that the castle has a medieval fantasy theme. 

Alt-Right Media Encouraged to Follow Porn’s Example

Far-right social media site, Parler, was shut down by Amazon - which had formerly hosted its server - after their alleged involvement in the January 6th riots in our nation’s capitol.  On January 14th, One Zero ran a fascinating article suggesting that alt-right media sites like Parler look to adult entertainment for solutions.  We’ve faced censorship for decades including server instability, threats of government censorship, and payment processors revoking access.  We’ve faced these challenges and survived.  We’ve adapted.  We are excellent at self-policing, removing most of the incentive for government intervention.  We’ve found and created a number of servers catering to our industry, and got creative by setting up our own payment processors, using expensive specialty services, or switching to cryptocurrency-only processing.  If the alt-right is smart, they would look to us as an example.  Pardon us if we don’t hold our breath awaiting any praise.