In October 2023, a report circulated that the world's largest porn site had confiscated the earnings of a former porn actress and handed them over to Israeli authorities. We checked whether there are reasons to trust this information.
Reports that Pornhub donated either all proceeds from films starring the star or payments intended to Mia Khalife personally for videos posted on the resource to Israel began to spread on October 14. In particular, Telegram channels wrote about this “Axe.Live"(2.4 million views at the time of writing this analysis), "Trash ⚡️ Ukraine"(1 million), Nexta Live (337,000) and "All-Seeing Eye 🇺🇦 Ukraine"(295,000). According to the TGStat service, at least two hundred channels shared the news in different variations. A number of posts illustrated screenshot of a note on the Marca News website, and part - roller with the logo of the American cable TV channel MSNBC. Subtitles for the video report that the former CEO of the porn service explained the decision this way: “Pornhub, as a Canadian company, showed the world one thing: it’s not only Americans who can take from Arabs and give to Jews.” Posts with similar content were also shared by a number of Russian And Ukrainian sites and Media, users "VKontakte" And X (formerly Twitter).
The message about the initiative of Pornhub management appeared after Khalifa urgently fired Dutch company producing psilocybin mushrooms Red Light Holland (from April 2023 girl provided consulting services to the company in exchange for the right to buy options, but the dismissal deprived her of this opportunity). Two days later it became known that with the ex-porn star tore Playboy contract, her page was removed from the magazine's website. In both cases the reason steel Mia Khalifa's statements on social network X, published shortly after the group's attack Hamas to Israel. The star, in particular, statedthat those who do not support Palestine "are on the wrong side of history" and also used the phrase "the Zionist apartheid regime."
Earlier posts about Pornhub's decision were accompanied by a video allegedly published by MSNBC. However, neither on his website and subsites, nor in its official social media accounts “Verified” could not find relevant information. As for the video itself, its design is radically different from that used in MSNBC; only the logo is the same. In particular, the TV channel uses different fonts.
The logo is located differently: in Reels on MSNBC's verified Instagram profile, it's in the bottom right corner, not the top corner, in YouTube Shorts it is not placed on the video itself - the channel logo is in the lower right corner, this is part of the platform design. The videos on the official accounts on YouTube and X do not have any special design; they are simply fragments from television broadcasts.
There are a number of inconsistencies in the text shown in the video. Mia Khalifa ended her active career in the porn industry in 2017, and since then her main income has been bring TikTok and OnlyFans accounts. The rights to the content of the channel with her name on Pornhub belong to the BangBros studio, which has more than once become the reason scandals — the actress demanded that the studio delete her old videos. The comment from the former CEO of MindGeek, which owns the service, Feras Antun, also seems illogical left his post in 2022 after successions scandals and accusations. A Pornhub official told the investigative project 404 Mediathat the information about freezing payments to Khalifa is false.
Please note that the video received much more widespread in English. Yes, only one fast on the social network X, published on the evening of October 15, received 21,000 likes, and the video itself was watched 8.6 million times. At the same time, in the English-speaking segment of the Internet, judging by the available data, it began to diverge later than in the Russian-speaking segment. The first tweet with a video allegedly released by MSNBC appeared in the pro-Russian English-language account @ivan_8848 on social network X on October 14 at 19:26 Moscow time, while, according to the TGStat service, in Russian-language channels (for example, “Shkvarka News" And "Shkvarka 2.0") it was published with an identical description more than an hour earlier.
October 16 note Khalifa and Pornhub were posted on the website of the Spanish newspaper Marca, which led to second, an even stronger wave of spreading the plot. It is the screenshot of this publication that illustrates posts with millions of views in Russian. At the same time, Marca journalists directly indicate MSNBC as the source (or rather, a fake video passed off as a report from this TV channel).
At the end of the video, it is mentioned that Mia Khalifa previously stated that weapons in the hands of Hamas were due to corruption in Ukraine and this is “the only benefit from this country.” It was not possible to find such a statement in the star’s accounts, but two days before the falsified MSNBC video in the Russian-language segment of Telegram spread a video with this statement, allegedly released by USA Today. It claimed that “porn actress Mia Khalifa thanked Ukraine, which she called a “corrupt black hole,” for supplying weapons to Hamas militants.” In particular, the video was posted by the channels “KB" (279,000 views) and "Heavenly"(219,000).
The video reports that Khalifa made this statement over the phone on the All Things Considered program of the American radio station KCRW (part of NPR), but there is no mention of the show with Khalifa, aired in October 2023, in the archive of the program on website NPR, neither generally in English-language sources. However, the video uses a recording of a conversation - it is claimed that this is a replica of an ex-porn actress. Although, judging by interview, her voice different From the presented fragment, an unambiguous conclusion about this (as well as about the potential use of neural networks for recreating a voice) can only be made with the help of special technical means.
As with the Pornhub story, there is no sign of the viral video on website and in social accounts USA Today does not, and the design does not match that used by the American publication. In the original videos, the logo is placed further from the top border of the video, the blue title bar in the upper left corner is noticeably wider, and the title font size is larger.
The earliest discovered “Verified” publication containing this video appeared on October 12 at 18:57 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “Sheikh Tamir"(126,000 views), not alone a dozen times caught in dissemination disinformation. However, unlike the video supposedly from MSNBC, this video gone popular among English-speaking users.
Thus, the story of Mia Khalifa's earnings from Pornhub being confiscated and subsequently transferred to Israel is fictitious. Even the very existence of these incomes is in question, and MSNBC never released the video used as evidence, which was most likely created in Russia. Khalifa’s earlier statement that weapons were transferred to Hamas militants from Ukraine is also unreliable. The corresponding video with the USA Today logo, which attributes this statement to her, is also falsified.
Cover photo: Twitter @miakhalifa
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