 is a Professor of Law at .
At a time of increased emphasis on , the country’s porn consumers can presumably rest easy. A Canadian business, , owns the world’s largest porn website, Pornhub. But do Canadian porn users have nothing to worry about?
On March 3, that Pornhub’s practices fail to ensure meaningful consent has been obtained from everyone appearing in videos uploaded to the platform, and that he will seek a federal court order directing Pornhub to comply with Canada’s privacy laws.
When ECP acquired Aylo (then called MindGeek), which owns Pornhub and other porn businesses, the company made numerous public statements. ECP’s executives stated in a release that Aylo was .” ECP executives also stated they were confident the company operates “.”
However, brought by women who allege Pornhub distributed videos of them without their consent, on the platform and allegations of do not align with ECP’s claims about Pornhub’s origins.
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Privacy commissioner’s report
ECP’s assertion that Pornhub was built on trust and safety is also refuted by the privacy commissioner’s findings. In 2024, Commissioner Philippe Dufresne released a regarding Aylo, following a complaint by a woman who alleged her ex-boyfriend uploaded a sexually explicit video of her to Pornhub without her consent. The video was copied and shared online hundreds of times.
The commissioner found that in 2015, when the video was posted, Pornhub’s process for ensuring consent was “wholly ineffective,” and that this had “devastating consequences for thousands of individuals whose intimate images were shared” without their knowledge and consent.
Dufresne stated the company was still failing “to ensure that it has obtained valid and meaningful consent from all individuals depicted in content uploaded to its websites.” He in his announcement on March 2. ECP, which disputes the commissioner’s findings, Dufresne’s report from being published, delaying its release by nearly a year.
horrific stories about their efforts to have videos removed from Pornhub that they did not consent to have uploaded (or in some cases, even created), only to be met with delay, a lack of response and administrative obstacles.
Today, and responding to take-down requests are significantly more robust; they are likely superior to the mechanisms used by other platforms. But the lawsuits, and the commissioner’s report suggest this is hardly a company “built upon a foundation of trust, safety and compliance.” And according to the Dufresne, Pornhub is still not compliant with the law.
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Harmful content
When they acquired the company, they bought Aylo to promote “consensual and sex-positive adult entertainment.” , , has examined content on porn platforms that depicts the sexual assault of sleeping or unconscious women, the sexual abuse of children by their fathers or step-fathers and the use of misogynistic meta-data — video titles, tags, and content categories — to promote content to users.
Depictions, including fictional ones, of sexual assault by step-fathers against step-daughters, or of sexual acts imposed upon sleeping women, are not sex-positive. Using misogynistic video titles and tags to organize and amplify hateful assertions about women and adolescent girls is not sex-positive.
prohibit this type of harmful content. If Pornhub consistently enforced its own rules regarding depictions of non-consensual sex, hate speech and community standards, the depictions of sexual assault and the hateful and discriminatory titles, tags and categories of porn that I found in my research would not be present.
The company could presumably do this, , and the success it has had relative to other platforms in .
The harms posed by fictional depictions of sexual assault, and the use of misogynistic titles and tags to promote porn, are significantly heightened because of the nature of the porn business today. Porn has in the last decade. .
Porn as social media
Like big tech generally, and social media in particular, by search engine optimization, algorithms, data and the advertising revenue that drives the internet’s . As a result, porn is now freely available to anyone with a cellphone, . And like other forms of social media, porn today is interactive.
These in the porn industry reveal that, if made easily accessible, will watch porn. Indeed, of Canadians visit Pornhub every day.
Contemporary porn’s ubiquity and social media character its capacity to shape our sexual culture, including in harmful ways. Broad social engagement with any practice, including the consumption of sexually explicit material, informs our relationships, norms and values. Eroticizing the sexual assault of unconscious women or step-daughters, or deploying misogynistic hate speech to shock, entice and arouse large segments of our communities, shapes how we understand and relate to consent, allegations of sexual assault and concepts of sexual desire.
There is nothing inherently harmful about watching porn, and not all porn contributes negatively to our social environment. However, ECP’s claims about the history of the world’s largest porn company suggest a lack of accountability regarding the that porn websites cause women and girls.
Transparency and accountability
Given porn’s heightened role in shaping our sexual culture in a , content that depicts sexual assault or is framed in the language of misogyny is harmful to all of us. Presumably, this is why Pornhub’s policies prohibit this type of content. But content moderation rules are only as good as their enforcement.
to reflect a “renewed commitment to…trust and safety” and to allow “the company to refocus its efforts to lead by example through transparency and public engagement.” The type of leadership that ECP contemplates requires a commitment to the truth and a willingness to rigorously uphold one’s own rules: the kind of commitment and willingness exhibited by Canada’s privacy commissioner, in this case.
To “lead by example,” ECP should start with transparency and forthright public accountability regarding the foundations upon which Pornhub was actually built and how it operated for many years. This must be followed by compliance with the privacy commissioner’s recommendations, and insistence that Pornhub’s content moderation policies are consistently and rigorously enforced.
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