Pornhub’s child rape video business is not an outlier. So why is it that a broadcast CEO would go to jail if her editor-in-chief put child rape videos on TV, but a tech CEO that outsources this exact task to an algorithmic editor-in-chief does not?Ĭanada must restore the rule of law online, and quickly, because Canadians are suffering real and irreversible harms - children especially. That sounds like an editorial decision, because it is. Only then do they decide what to show us and what to hide. To maintain our attention and show us ads, they must know our interests and which content matches our interests. Much attention is paid to the nefarious ways in which these firms harvest our personal data to ascertain our interests. They are hyper-personalized recommendation engines. Facebook, YouTube and Pornhub are not dumb repositories of user-generated content. We could stop there, but the platforms’ responsibility runs deeper still.
Yet despite this awareness, Canadian politicians, judges, prosecutors and police officers fail to apply the law.
All of these companies have complaints processes where problematic content is flagged. And according to a recent legal analysis, disseminators like YouTube, Facebook and Pornhub are liable under Canadian law for spreading harmful content produced by others, if they know about it in advance and disseminate anyway, or if they are notified afterwards and fail to remove it. Yet we should pay little heed to this self-serving spin, because in Canada, the law is all that counts. Pornhub and Facebook would have you believe that they can make illegal content globally available, recommend it to people who didn’t ask to see it, and rake in unholy sums of money by selling ads against this content without being legally responsible for it.
For these companies, the real villains are the people who create and update this horrid content. That’s exactly what the platforms would have us believe, reflecting just how successful they’ve been at framing the discussion in Ottawa to fit their interests. So why does the government believe that it cannot act until new legislation passes? Is the legality of promoting child rape videos somehow ambiguous? Justice Minister Lametti need only dial 911. We don’t need to wait for new legislation.
Surely it goes without saying that promoting and profiting from the sexual assault of children is already illegal in Canada. Pornhub recommending child rape videos isn’t a scandal. Yet this response betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. In Ottawa, the opposition is asking urgent questions about how this could happen in Canada, and the government is adamant that it will introduce legislation to address the issue of online hate after the House returns from its Christmas break. The Montreal company is the undisputed global leader in online pornography, but it also has a habit of disseminating criminal videos, including of children as young as 14 being sexually assaulted. Some of the videos allegedly featured a bald man who had been seen with the teen in February at an area convenience store.The New York Times published a stomach-churning report last week about Pornhub. Adam Granit said in the report, according to WPLG.īut the videos also offered a clue about the teen’s whereabouts. In the videos, the teen “is either fully nude (or) topless in all videos and performs oral sex and sexual intercourse in at least two of the videos,” Det. The teen’s mother spotted the videos in September and told investigators-who later uncovered nearly 60 pornographic videos of the missing 15-year-old on Periscope, Pornhub, Modelhub, Snapchat and other websites, according to an arrest report obtained by The South Florida Sun Sentinel.Ĭhristopher Johnson, 30, is now facing one count of lewd and lascivious battery on a child under the age of 16 after authorities say they found him with the teen. A missing Florida teen has been found almost a year after she disappeared after her distraught mom found sexually explicit photos and video of her on PornHub.