Conservative MP Arnold Viersen is calling for enactment of legislation to safeguard youth from online sexual exploitation. This comes on the heels of recent claims by a Pornhub employee that the Quebec-based adult video platform has a shortage of moderators tasked with reviewing and removing content potentially linked to these offences.
The Canadian-owned website allows the general public to upload pornographic videos.
Mr. Viersen pointed out that adult video platforms such as Pornhub are replete with violent pornography and operate with minimal scrutiny. He emphasized the need to urge the government to ensure that Canadian laws adequately address this situation.
Pornhub reviewed videos flagged for potentially criminal content like child sexual abuse only for those that received over 15 complaints, and the website had over 700,000 videos with between 1 and 15 flags in 2021, a series of emails has revealed. The documents were disclosed as part of a class-action lawsuit against MindGeek filed by 40 women in California in 2021.
“The system is so slow, and they don’t have enough moderators, [so a particular video] stays up for long enough that people can get mad and sue them. I think that’s what happens,” he said.
“[Pornhub] made so much money, and they were [at] the top of the world, but they fumbled so hard because they didn’t take any of that money and reinvest it into moderation or the quality of the site.”
On Sept. 29, 26 U.S. state attorneys general sent a joint letter to Aylo demanding that it address P0rnhub’s “loophole” exposed by Sound Investigations.Survivor
Victoria Galy, a survivor and advocate against sexual exploitation, has made continuous efforts to raise concerns about Pornhub’s content moderation.“I’m a victim of sex trafficking under the legal definition in Tennessee in the United States. I’ve had numerous non-consensual pornographic images and videos of me posted on Pornhub.com,” she told the committee.
In an interview on Sept. 21, Ms. Galy told The Epoch Times that she tried to upload advocacy videos on Pornhub in 2022 to raise awareness about the presence of videos on the platform featuring individuals whose faces are obscured or only partially shown, rendering them unidentifiable. This lack of facial identification raises concerns about potential criminal exploitation of victims of sexual exploitation, including minors, she said.
Ms. Galy said her videos were promptly disabled, with a message stating that they were “unavailable pending review.” Citing the findings by Sound Investigations, she emphasized that the claims regarding the company’s inadequate content moderation appear to contradict her own personal experience.
In addition to moderator shortage, Pornhub employee Mr. Rice had also mentioned other challenges in regulating user-uploaded content, particularly when it comes to verifying the legal age of the individuals involved. This challenge is more pronounced when a substantial portion of the content comes from different parts of the world, each with varying age-identification systems, he said.
Lawsuits
MindGeek came under investigation in December 2020 following an article by The New York Times (NYT) highlighting cases of minors who had been subjected to rape or sexual abuse and had videos of their mistreatment uploaded to Pornhub.In response to the report, Pornhub told NYT that it had banned unverified users from posting new content and suspended materials that were not created by members of its partner and model programs. The company claimed innocence and alleged it was being targeted by organizations dedicated to abolishing pornography.
Pornhub also said in December 2020 that it had removed content from unverified users, which reportedly comprises roughly 80 percent of all content on the platform. At the same time, the company banned the upload and download of unverified content.
Ms. Galy, however, is worried that videos edited using new technologies like artificial intelligence might still be re-uploaded.
“There’s no way to track at this point, to my knowledge, how many videos are on Pornhub. So when they claimed that they took down 80 percent [of the content], I can’t tell you how much of that 80 percent has been re-uploaded,” she said.
In a Sept. 21 newsletter obtained by The Epoch Times, Pornhub announced an upcoming update to its verification process. The update will mandate content creators to provide evidence of co-performer identification and that they have given consent before new content is uploaded to Pornhub. The company said this enhanced verification process is scheduled to be rolled out in the “coming weeks.”
Other lawsuits against Pornhub and Aylo have also highlighted concerns about the company’s inadequate response to addressing loopholes on its website.
“So basically a video with 15 flags is never viewed,” said a portion of another e-mail on the same day.
This implies that even if victims flag their own videos on Pornhub 15 times, those videos may still not receive attention.
Due Diligence Lacking
Mike Farley, another Pornhub employee who was also secretly recorded by Sound Investigations, acknowledged that the platform had not performed proper due diligence in reviewing videos with controversial content.“We weren’t as compliant as we should have been, honestly,” said Mr. Farley, identified as a technical product manager at Pornhub who was one of the platform’s first employees.
However, Mr. Farley noted that Pornhub has not exercised due diligence in verifying the identities of the individuals depicted in the adult videos.
“You don’t know who that is [in the adult video]. We don’t have consent of that person, and we are running ads,” he said. “As a business, we’re monetizing content that we don’t know where this comes from, we don’t know who’s on that video, we don’t know the age of the person on the video.”
Mr. Rice suggested that Pornhub could operate legally by using content from professional pornography studios, in compliance with U.S. Code 2257, which mandates companies to maintain meticulous records of actors’ legal age. However, he said Pornhub instead views these studio-made content as competition for its predominantly user-uploaded content.Legislative Efforts
In her testimony before the House of Commons ethics committee in 2021, Ms. Galy, who has suffered cognitive trauma as a result of being a victim of image-based sexual exploitation, emphasized the difficulties individuals like her face when trying to have their videos removed from Pornhub.In 2018, Ms. Galy reported approximately 30 videos in which she was featured on Pornhub, but only three were removed at that time. To have the remaining videos taken down, Pornhub requested that she submit a “DMCA takedown notice”–a copyright infringement notification. She highlighted the challenges of claiming copyright infringement when it comes to videos in which she was featured but were edited and uploaded by other content creators.
“To think of the amount of money that Pornhub has made off my trauma, date rape, and sexual exploitation makes me sick to my stomach,” she told the ethics committee on Feb. 19, 2021.
Ms. Galy said she also found other Pornhub profiles that claimed to own videos in which she appeared.
“I’ve reached out to Pornhub over the past year. I’ve found the additional model names that were different from Vicky Lust, and I’ve explained to them [that] this is me, this is my birthmark, and asked them to take the stuff down, and they have declined to do so,” she said.
“They claim that these videos are uploaded by quote, ’verified users,' but the problem is that these verified users are still not the people in the videos.” Ms. Galy added.
