The main stat cited in this article is misleading.
Also, it wasn’t 62 million individuals, it was total monthly site visits. You can count as tens, hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of visits to any given site as long as you visit it enough. (and depending on how that number is calculated)
Doesn’t mean this isn’t a problem, but it doesn’t mean there are 62 million men out there actively visiting this site every month for that kind of content…
…and the views also included every category of content on the site, much of which is just what you could find on any porn site.
So just to clarify - the 62 million visitors were in one month, as Snopes makes clear.
However as you say 62 million visits in internet terms is a nonsense and not equivalent to unique visitors. Such metrics count every page hit so 1 user browsing through pages in one visit will count as multiple visits, and that user may return multiple times.
And the biggest piece of information is that this is a general porn site, with 100 categories of porn. As snopes says “Examples include “blonde,” “skinny” and “webcam” — among many others.” So we don’t actually know who viewed this particular category.
CNN did a decent investigation particularly as they found a telegram group with 1000 users, but the porn site stuff has been misreported by other outlets. We live in an era of slop journalism where people just steal content from the source and make crap poorly researched content from it, or spread stupid rumours.
I’ve downvoted this - the article is very poorly written and poorly research rubbish. The “journalist” is totally ignorant of the facts, and repeats falsehoods constantly throughout.
Snopes debunks this well as a another user posted: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/online-rape-academy-cnn/
Essentially, no not 62 million men; 62 million web hits (not gendered) to a general porn site - not even the specific category being discussed. Far fewer people (1 person can make multiple hits on a visit, and can visit multiple times in a month), yes likely mostly men, but of those people a small proportion will have sought out the specific content. We have no way of knowing how many but given this is a general porn site, and a very niche topic, likely very few.
So this article is just sensationalist rubbish from a poor quality journalist and a seemingly very low quality publication.
Holy shit, what a dismissive take on the article. This exact reaction is part of the problem .
Who gives a shit about the accurate reporting of the number. How about the broader issue of a) sleep rape, proven in court, b) that rapists have published their exploits online, and C) that there is an audience for same.
Take your semantics and fuck off.
The points raised are important because they determine how prevalent the problem is, and how sensationalized the article is.
There are 6 BILLION internet users. So 1 in 100,000 internet users have viewed these rape videos. Oh wait, less than that, that’s for the whole site. Oh wait, less than that, that’s hits, not unique visitors. Oh wait, only half of that 6 billion are men, more or less. Oh wait, women view porn, too. Etc.
This takes it from something that statistically is a concern for my small city to something that statistically has a single dangerous individual in my city, at most.
We perhaps shouldn’t make special units to deal with this where I live, but should maybe have awareness courses for law enforcement and healthcare professionals to help identify potential victims. Larger cities may want to take a different approach.
So you have personally poked enough holes in the article, and broken down the problem in your head sufficiently, that you are comfortable to ignore the issue.
It must be nice to love in a comfortable bubble like that.
I specifically said what I was comfortable with doing to respond to this problem, depending on the size of the local population and therefore the likelihood of this actually occurring. Neither response was ‘nothing’.
Journalists are supposed to give a shit. Reporting needs to be accurate for people to be well informed, not sensational exploitation of an actual issue to personally profit from clicks.
Take that argument up with the editor. It doesn’t respond to the concern.
If this is the first you’re hearing of this I can understand your reaction, but this issue has been discussed for about two weeks and there’s better reporting out there. You don’t have to defend clickbait.
Yes it is the first, thank you for the response.
Strange. I see 77 upvotes and 0 downvote.
Downvotes only apply for people who are subscribed to the community.
Didn’t know that. Thanks
Surely there is at least one person who visits the site multiple times.
Or bots.
Yeah
“The
wc -l site.log*said 62M”
CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses rape
SIXTY-TWO MILLION. That’s the number of visits in one month to the porn site Motherless.com, which hosts 20,000 “sleep” videos, made by men who have drugged and raped their girlfriends and wives. No, it’s not all men. But it’s tens of millions of them.
This horrific figure was highlighted by the CNN report ‘Exposing a global “rape academy”’ on 26 March. The concept of “sleep” videos (can we call them rape videos, please?) was made famous in the court case of French man Dominique Pelicot, who drugged and raped his unconscious wife, Gisèle, along with 50 of his friends and associates.
The world was confronted by this grotesque rape practice in 2024 during the mass rape and drugging trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men in southern France. Pelicot had been drugging and raping his wife for nine years and inviting friends and acquaintances into his home to share in the rape.
He uploaded the rape videos to an online forum where he helped to educate other men on how to drug and rape their partners. He has also been charged with murdering and raping a 23-year-old woman, and attempting to rape another.I mean, even if it’s a few orders of magnitudes off, it’s still bad.
Well, made me click so the headline did what it was supposed to and the content was exactly what I expected.
Tl;dr: men bad.
Td;dr: men bad.
Some men bed.
Any dude out there doing this shit is a pathetic creep. Don’t ever do that, ever. Even watching it is fucking weird.
How very surprising.
Is anyone really? Statistically the odds of a man being a decent person is close to none.
