Porn site reported no suspicious videos to RCMP, agency says
Pornhub made no disclosures from 2011-19; faces allegations users posted child pornography
The Canadian-based website Pornhub, which has come under fire over allegations that its users posted child pornography, did not report any suspicious content to the RCMP between 2011 — when legislation made reporting to law enforcement mandatory — and 2019.
Pornhub, which is owned by the Montreal-based company MindGeek, is by far the world’s most popular pornography website, attracting some 3.5 billion visits per month.
But it was only in 2020, the RCMP says, that it first received notice of potential child pornography posted on Pornhub — and none of those reports came directly from the company.
Instead, those cases were flagged by the U.S.-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which passed along 120 reports to the RCMP from among more than 13,000 suspicious posts that Pornhub flagged for the organization in 2020.
Under Canadian law — the “Act Respecting the Mandatory Reporting of Internet Child Pornography by Persons Who Provide an Internet Service” — a company must report to “an officer, constable or other person employed for the preservation and maintenance of the public peace” if it has “reasonable grounds” to believe that its service has been used to distribute child pornography.
A first offence under the act can result in fines for individuals of up to $1,000, and up to $10,000 for a company. Subsequent offences can be punished with fines of up to $100,000.
Since the law came into effect, “Pornhub/MindGeek have not made any disclosures directly to the RCMP,” Cpl. Caroline Duval said in a written statement to the Star.
The law does not specify which law enforcement agency a company must report suspected child porn to.
The Star repeatedly asked the company why it hadn’t reported suspected cases of child porn to the Mounties, and if it had reported suspicious material to any other police force or organization prior to 2020.
In an email, a company spokesperson identified only as “Ian” did not directly answer to those questions.
“MindGeek goes above and beyond what might be required by Canadian law,” Ian wrote.
“In fact, in 2020, MindGeek became the first adult site to begin automatic reporting to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to ensure rapid and reliable reporting of any content identified as CSAM to appropriate law enforcement agencies around the world, including the RCMP,” he said.
Pornhub was founded in 2007, and was sold in 2010 to a company that would rename itself MindGeek in 2013.
It became the most popular destination in the world for pornography fans to both view and upload videos. But in December, a scathing New York Times report alleged the company had turned a blind eye to users who posted videos of non-consensual sex and child pornography.
That led to high-profile decisions by Visa and Mastercard to cancel their billing arrangement with the company, and intense scrutiny from the House of Commons standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics.
At a committee hearing last month, NDP MP Charlie Angus pressed MindGeek chief executive officer Feras Antoon and chief operating officer David Tassillo to provide records detailing how many times the company had reported posting of suspected child pornography to the RCMP.
“If you’re following the law, that should be a pretty straightforward thing to give us,” said Angus.
“All that information is available,” Tassillo said, adding that the company referred all potential cases to U.S.-based NCMEC.
Conservative MP Arnold Viersen asked the executives if they could confirm that there were no reports to NCMEC in 2019.
“At this point, they were manually done, they weren’t automatically done, so they were done ad hoc — as we were made aware of them, we would send them off,” responded Tassillo, adding that he couldn’t confirm whether there were any reports to NCMEC during that year and that the company made changes in 2020 to how it reports them.
“I know we’ve worked with all levels of authorities whether it be the RCMP, provincial police, municipal police … (or the) FBI,” he said.
NCMEC says the company began alerting it about posts of suspected child pornography in 2020.
In a statement to the Star, NCMEC said it had not received reports from Pornhub or MindGeek prior to 2020.
Duval said the RCMP received 120 of those referrals in 2020.
“We sought to discuss the Mandatory Reporting Act with Pornhub/MindGeek; however, they indicated that they were reporting to NCMEC based on the advice of their legal counsel,” she wrote.
Shortly after the New York Times story was published in December, Pornhub removed 10 million videos from its platform.
The sheer volume of people using the website raises questions about how likely it was that no one ever complained to its operator about any videos posted there, critics say.
“I find it highly unlikely that nobody ever made a complaint to Pornhub or MindGeek about content that was on their services,” said Andrea Slane, a legal studies professor at Ontario Tech University.
“It would seem, at the very least, that that is suspicious.”