National Post (National Edition)

Executives at Pornhub defend efforts to prevent child porn on their websites

- JACOB SEREBRIN

MONTREAL • Representa­tives of Pornhub told a parliament­ary committee Friday they didn’t know if they had been contacted by a woman who said she struggled to have a video of her removed from the popular pornograph­y website.

Feras Antoon and David Tassillo of MindGeek, parent company of Pornhub, told the committee on access to informatio­n, privacy and ethics that they couldn’t find records of any correspond­ence with Serena Fleites.

Fleites, however, told the committee on Monday that she had to ask Pornhub multiple times to remove an explicit video of her — taken when she was 14 years old — that was posted on the site without her consent.

Antoon, MindGeek partowner and CEO of the company’s Canadian operations said, “We started an investigat­ion and we do not have enough informatio­n to see if she ever contacted us at all.

“With the informatio­n we have today, we cannot find anything from what Ms. Fleites is saying.”

While Antoon said he didn’t want to suggest Fleites was lying, he said the first time he heard of her was when the company was contacted by a journalist. It was not the only time the executives didn’t have answers for the committee.

Antoon and Tassillo were called to testify in front of

MPs regarding whether they planned to make reparation­s for “the company’s failure to prohibit rape videos and other illegal content from its site,” according to a committee motion in December.

The firm is facing a classactio­n lawsuit in Quebec, alleging it profited off material showing child sexual abuse and non-consensual activity since 2007. It is also being sued by 40 women in California who claim the company continues to profit from pornograph­ic videos of them that were published without their full consent.

Pornhub says it has removed all videos uploaded by non-verified users after the adult website faced accusation­s it hosted illegal content. The move came after Visa and MasterCard launched investigat­ions and decided in December to stop allowing their cards to be used on Pornhub. Between eight and 10 million videos uploaded by unverified users were removed from the website after the change, Tassillo, MindGeek co-owner and chief operating officer, told the committee.

Asked by Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith how many times in 2020 people asked to have content removed because they didn’t consent to it being posted, Antoon said the company was preparing a transparen­cy report that would be made public soon.

When Erskine-Smith asked about previous years, Tassillo said the company has the informatio­n but that he didn’t know off “the top of my head.”

He also said he didn’t know how many times child pornograph­y that appeared on the site had been reported to authoritie­s or how much the company has paid in legal settlement­s to people — adults or children — who did not consent to having explicit videos of them posted on the site.

“I can ensure you that number would be way below what I spend annually to protect the children and protect my site,” Tassillo said.

While MindGeek — one of the world’s largest producers and distributo­rs of pornograph­y — is legally headquarte­red in Luxembourg, Antoon and Tassillo live in Montreal where the company employs around 1,000 people.

Tassillo and Antoon said their company is a “world leader” in preventing the distributi­on of images of child sexual abuse and non-consensual pornograph­y. If Pornhub was full of child pornograph­y and non-consensual pornograph­y, the four million Canadians who visit the site daily would be calling the police, Antoon said.

They said all content that appears on the website is screened using multiple software tools before being approved by human moderators. “We always instruct all our agents to err on the caution side, if you have any doubt at all, just don’t let it up,” Tassillo said.

WE ALWAYS INSTRUCT ALL OUR AGENTS TO ERR ON THE CAUTION SIDE.

 ?? ADRIAN WYLD / THE CANADIAN PRESS ?? MindGeek's Feras Antoon waits Friday to appear virtually before the House of Commons Standing
Committee on Access to Informatio­n.
ADRIAN WYLD / THE CANADIAN PRESS MindGeek's Feras Antoon waits Friday to appear virtually before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Informatio­n.

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