PORNHUB'S NEW SAFETY STRATEGIES.
Years of campaigns spark changes
The company behind Canada's largest Internet export — pornography — has announced new strategies to keep videos of child abuse or non-consensual sex off its network, which includes the adult-film giant Pornhub.
It comes after years of campaigns against Mindgeek, the company that was started in Montreal and is behind Pornhub and several other adult streaming websites such as Redtube and Youporn. The campaigns claimed the network hosts a variety of illegal or unethical content, ranging from child abuse to videos filmed without the consent of participants, and videos that show sexual assault.
While Mindgeek and Pornhub, which ranks 60th in the most heavily trafficked websites worldwide, have long maintained they have a commitment to fighting illegal and non-consensual content, the company announced on Tuesday what it calls “industry-leading safety and security policies” that will encompass “verification, moderation and detection” to fight against such content.
“Over the years, we have demonstrated our resolute commitment to leading the fight against illegal online content,” said a statement from Feras Antoon, Mindgeek's CEO, and David Tassillo, its chief operating officer.
Mindgeek will be verifying content uploaders to ensure their identity. They also have a widespread content-moderation strategy using artificial intelligence and manual audits, and will issue transparency reports. The company is also partnering with dozens of non-profit organizations that are dedicated to content flagging and stopping child exploitation for communications.
“At Pornhub, nothing is more important than the safety of our community. Our core values such as inclusivity, freedom of expression and privacy, are only possible when our platform is trusted by our users,” says Pornhub's “commitment to trust and safety” website.
The complaints against Mindgeek, and more specifically against Pornhub, have been a part of campaigns to end pornography more broadly. They've come to prominence more recently, mainly via evangelical “abolitionist” organizations, such as Exodus Cry, a California-based Christian group that seeks to end porn, strip clubs and prostitution.
The claims against Pornhub came to a head in December, when the New York Times published a lengthy report by columnist Nicholas Kristof that repeated several of the claims made by these organizations — that there is extensive child abuse imagery and non-consensual content on Mindgeek's properties and that they have been insufficient at policing content and slow to flag and remove illegal content.
The U.k.-based Internet Watch Foundation says it found 118 child abuse images on Pornhub between January 2017 and October 2019. In comparison, the U.s.based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says they received 16.9 million referrals from tech companies about possible child abuse — well over 90 per cent of those came from Facebook.
Canada, meanwhile, is studying “protection of privacy and reputation on platforms such as Pornhub” in the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. It had its first meeting Monday. Among the speakers was Serena Fleites, who told the New York Times when she was 14 a video she sent to her boyfriend ended up on Pornhub.
“I spend more time with my dogs than with actual humans. Just being around other humans now causes me anxiety,” Fleites said. “It still affects me even to this day, even after everything they said they were doing to fix it.”
Another speaker, Michael Bowe, a partner with Brown Rudnick, who represented evangelical celebrity Jerry Falwell Jr., during a recent sex scandal, said Mindgeek was “the Monsanto of porn” and argued the company needs compliance and moderation.
“It is the flagship ... it is a problem, but the problem is a lot bigger,” Bowe told legislators. “You are dealing with a rogue company ... its behaviour here is completely out of bounds.”
Charlie Angus, a New Democrat on the committee, promised Fleites and Bowe that “we are going to hold these guys to account.”
On Friday, Antoon and Tassillo will testify before the committee.
Shortly after the New York Times article was published, Mindgeek pulled millions of videos from unverified users on their websites.
Mindgeek says only verified users will now be able to upload videos to the website, and anyone seeking to join the “model program” — basically to produce amateur content that allows performers to earn money — will need to provide a photo and government ID. Pornhub is partnering with Yoti, a digital identity service, to verify people.
Mindgeek also says it is expanding moderation both in terms of training staff who do manual audits of videos uploaded to its platforms, and artificial intelligence technology from Youtube, Microsoft and Google that search for and identify illegal or child abuse content.
There is also a partnership between Mindgeek and 40 non-profit organizations that work with child safety online — a “trusted flagger program” — that will have direct access to content moderation teams.