MP Calls for Law to Fight Online Sexual Exploitation Amid Pornhub Employee’s Claim Regarding Content Moderation

The Pornhub website is shown on a computer screen in Toronto on Dec. 16, 2020. The Canadian Press

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.

In a statement to The Epoch Times, Mr. Viersen highlighted proposed legislation such as Bill S-210 and Bill C-270, which he described as “key steps forward in protecting women and youth online from exploitation both sides of the screen.” He also expressed concerns about the ambiguity in Canada’s laws concerning violent pornography.

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.

“MindGeek must acknowledge the immense harm it has done, settle the lawsuits with victims and pay restitution, and stop allowing videos of abuse from being uploaded,” he said, referring to Montreal-based MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub.

Bill S-210, introduced in the Senate in November 2021, aims to criminalize organizations making sexually explicit material available to young people on the internet. However, it has remained in standstill in the House of Commons since May 2023.

Bill C-270, introduced by Mr. Viersen in April 2022, seeks to prohibit the creation and distribution of pornographic content for commercial purposes without proper age verification and consent from all parties involved. This bill has made no progress since its introduction.

Mr. Viersen recently raised this issue in Parliament on Sept. 21. He said that MindGeek, which changed its name to Aylo in August, is currently facing nine lawsuits involving nearly 200 victims. He referred to a video released on Sept. 20 by U.S.-based non-profit Sound Investigations, in which an undercover journalist obtained comments from Dillon Rice, identified in the video as a “senior script writer” at Aylo.

Mr. Rice said the platform does not have enough moderators to review videos flagged for potential issues.

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.

She testified before the House of Commons ethics committee in February 2021 after learning that the committee was inquiring into the ethics of the company.

“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.

“They had enough moderation to [detect my content] when I was speaking out about what they were doing, but they are claiming that they don’t have enough moderation to [detect content involving children],” Ms. Galy said.

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.

Mr. Rice is a “senior content specialist” at MindGeek, now called Aylo, where he has been employed for more than six years, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Aylo has not responded to multiple requests for comment from The Epoch Times. Efforts to contact Mr. Rice for comment, both through Aylo and his LinkedIn profile, were unsuccessful.

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.

Subsequently, both CEO Feras Antoon and chief operating officer David Tassillo of Pornhub resigned from their positions at MindGeek in June 2022. A spokesperson at the time denied that their departure was connected to the revelations, reported CTV News.

Following the NYT report, credit card companies MasterCard and Visa announced in December 2020 that they would no longer allow their cards to be used to process payments on Pornhub. However, as of Oct. 3, 2023, it appears that card payments options through Visa and Master for products on Pornhub Apparels are still operational with the use of payment service provider QuickPay.

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.

In the 2021 class-action lawsuit filed by 40 women in California against MindGeek, an email dated May 27, 2020, which was part of the court documents recently disclosed, revealed discussions among executives from both Pornhub and MindGeek regarding their video review process. The email indicated that their team “reviews between 50 and 500 videos per day that are flagged in order to address any video with more than 15 flags.”

“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.

The flagging feature on Pornhub is intended to bring a video to the attention of company staff and any automated video removal system they may have in place.

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.

Pornhub currently requires content creators to verify their identity before uploading videos by submitting official documents—such as a driver’s licence or passport—containing personal information including their date of birth, ID expiration date, a profile photo, full legal name, and address.

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.

U.S. Code 2257 is a law that requires anyone who produces explicit adult content–including books, videos, or images–to keep records about the people who appear in that item. The law was established to ensure that adult content producers can prove the ages of the people involved and to prevent the use of underage individuals in such 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.

Ms. Galy was unsuccessful in her attempts to have a video removed in which her face couldn’t be identified but a birthmark on her body was clearly visible. She argued her case by pointing out that she could still be identified by the birthmark, but her efforts to have the video removed were fruitless.

She also had trouble removing the “Vicky Lust” profile on Pornhub. In 2021, two years after she first alerted the company of her sexual exploitation, Pornhub finally took down the posts involving Ms. Galy after The New York Times released its article. Pornhub also said it had “fingerprinted” the content to prevent re-uploads.” But Ms. Galy testified at the time that those videos had already garnered 8 million views.

“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.

She has been collaborating with U.S. legislators like Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee in an effort to pass a law allowing people to be identified by other bodily traits, such as birthmarks and piercings. The law would require adult content websites to promptly remove pornographic images upon receiving notices that they were uploaded without consent, “not later than 72 hours after receiving the request.”