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

In 2020, a U.S court ruled that the pornography company GirlsDoPorn, which specialises in the genre of "amateur"-style porn, defrauded and trafficked 22 women through varying degrees of force and coercion. While the women were successful in suing the company directly for damages, there remains an ongoing concern around the implications for the larger platform that hosted, and continues to host, this material-Pornhub (owned by tech company "MindGeek"). Using the GirlsDoPorn and MindGeek partnership as an example, this chapter offers a critical feminist socio-cultural theorisation of the politics of (non)responsibility. We argue that this must be conceptualised as operating within the combined rationalities of "postfeminism" reactive formations of popular misogyny, and technocapitalism, in ways that both facilitated the exploitative practices of "GirlsDoPorn" and offered a problematic cultural carte blanche for companies and platforms like Pornhub and MindGeek to construct (non)responsibility for gendered harms.