The heads of PornHub , the largest free porn site on the Internet, were unable to answer questions this Friday from Canadian parliamentarians about why the website has included child pornography, images of rape and videos of non-consensual relationships for years or delay the withdrawal of these materials despite declaring themselves the ethical leaders in the sector.
The CEO of MindGeek, the company responsible for PornHub and other porn sites such as Brazzers and Reality Kings, Feras Antoon, its director of operations, David Tassillo, and the company’s vice president, Corey Urman, appeared before the privacy committee of the Lower House of the Canadian Parliament to respond to accusations launched against the company in December by The New York Times.
But to the exasperation of the Canadian deputies, none of the three highest officials of PornHub responded to the committee’s key questions, especially those referring to the complaints of at least two women who accuse the website of taking months to remove videos in which they are raped and tortured , one of them when she was only 13 years old.
false image
At least, Antoon’s appearance served to reveal the true face of MindGeek’s CEO . As the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail revealed on Thursday, the only image publicly known so far of the CEO was the one that appears on a web page with his name. The problem is that the image that accompanies his biography is that of a Norwegian individual who bears little resemblance to the real image of Antoon , an unattractive man with a wide nose and deep receding temples.
During his appearance, Antoon said he was “devastated by what the victims of these horrendous acts have been through.” “This type of material has no place on our platform and is contrary to our values ​​and business model,” he stated. .
But at times, the appearance of Antoon and Tassillo seemed more like an attempt to promote PornHub than trying to clarify the issues of the Canadian deputies or the accusations made against the company by several victims and the article in the New York newspaper.
The two extolled the benefits of MindGeek, a company with 460 million dollars in annual revenues and legally registered in Luxembourg , with subsidiaries in Cyprus and Romania but whose real headquarters are in Montreal , where 1,000 of the company’s 1,800 employees work. And Antoon was proud that PornHub is the fifth most visited website in the world, with 3.5 billion visits per month.
In the article, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof accused PornHub of being “infected with rape videos. It monetizes child rape, revenge porn, spycam videos of women showering, racist and misogynistic content, and images of smothered women.” with plastic bags.
Rape and child pornography
Following the publication of the article, the credit card companies Visa and MasterCard announced that they would stop processing payments to the MindGeek sites, although the two companies subsequently limited the ban on PornHub and resumed processing payments from the MindGeek sites. MindGeek that use videos made with professional porn actors.
After the measures adopted by Visa and MasterCard, PornHub proceeded to remove millions of videos from its website whose authorship could not be verified and imposed security measures that have reduced the number of videos that PornHub contains from 13.5 to 3 million. Antoon and Tassillo declared that the withdrawal of those 10 million videos from the platform is a sign of “the evolution ” of the website to ensure that its content is legal or has been shared legally.
But when Canadian MPs pressed the two executives about why they had waited to remove such unverified content until the publication of Kristof’s article and the actions of the credit card companies, Antoon and Tassillo wereunable to give a coherent answer.The only thing that Antoon could claim in his defense is that the presence of child pornography on PornHub “loses money” and “ruins the brand” that they have “been building for years.”
Tassillo also couldn’t explain why the company failed to act when Serena Fleites , who testified before the same committee Monday, alerted PornHub that the website contained a sex tape of her from when she was 13.Fleites told deputies that many in her school used the video on PornHub to threaten and try to blackmail her and that its publication caused her depression and drug use. For weeks, Fleites tried to get PornHub to take down the video of her. When the web did it, it had been downloaded by people all over the world and reposted.
Evasive
Antoon and Tassillo declared today that they have not found any reference to the Fleites case and that they did not have “enough information” to speak about that specific case. Both were also unable to indicate how many times PornHub has reported in recent years to the Canadian Police, as is its legal obligation, the existence of videos with child pornography or violations.. “I don’t have the number in front of me,” Tassillo replied several times.
And for a company whose business model has been based on showing millions of people’s most intimate moments, with or without their consent, Canadian lawmakers couldn’t help but highlight the irony of executives especially zealous in preserving their privacy.
Antoon and Tassillo cited their privacy in order not to reveal their salaries or company benefits. They also justified Urman and other PornHub employees making statements to the media using false names to ensure the “safety” of the staff. Antoon also did not want to confirm that he drives a Lamborghinior that a mansion is being built in the north of Montreal because, he said, nobody should be interested in that data.
