Evidence of meeting #19 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was site.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Feras Antoon  Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada
David Tassillo  Chief Operating Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada
Corey Urman  Vice-President, Product Management, Video Sharing Platform, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

1 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Chris Warkentin

This is the 19th meeting of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.

We are resuming our study today on the protection of privacy and reputation on online video platforms such as Pornhub.

I'd like to remind you that our meeting today is televised.

Today we have three witnesses at our committee. From MindGeek, we have Feras Antoon, chief executive officer; David Tassillo, chief operating officer; and Corey Urman, vice-president, video-sharing platform.

I'd like to remind the witnesses today that any witness before a parliamentary committee has a duty to tell the whole truth, and any failure to do so might result in a finding of contempt of Parliament. I'll remind all members of that.

Gentlemen, we'll turn to you for your opening statements. I don't know what you've arranged, in terms of who will go first, but we'll turn it over to you. Unmute yourself when you're prepared to speak. Then, we'll have some questions for you once we've heard your opening statements.

1 p.m.

Feras Antoon Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

Good afternoon. My name is Feras Antoon.

I'm the chief executive officer of Entreprise MindGeek Canada. With me are David Tassillo, chief operations officer, and Corey Urman, vice-president of product management, video-sharing platforms. We are grateful to the committee for the opportunity to speak with you today.

MindGeek is one of the largest, most well-known brands in the online adult entertainment space. Our flagship website, Pornhub, is among the top five most visited websites on the Internet. Over 12.5% of the adult Canadian population visit our website every day. As a leader in this industry, we share the committee's concern about the spread of unlawful content online and about the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. It goes against everything we stand for at MindGeek and Pornhub.

When David and I joined MindGeek in 2008, our goal was to create the most inclusive and safe adult community on the Internet. It was designed to celebrate freedom of expression, to value privacy and to empower adults from all walks of life. We knew this could be possible only if safety and security were our top priority. While we have remained steadfast in our commitment to protect our users and the public, we recognize that we could have done more in the past and we must do more in the future.

I want to be clear to every member of this honourable committee, and to the Canadian public, that even a single unlawful or non-consensual image on MindGeek's platforms is one too many, full stop. We are fathers and husbands. We have over 1,800 employees with families and loved ones. We are devastated by what the victims of these heinous acts have gone through. I want to emphasize that this type of material has no place on our platforms and is contrary to our values and our business model. We are sickened when anyone attempts to abuse our platforms to further their violence. Fortunately, the vast majority of attempts by criminals to use our platform for illicit material are stopped.

Before I speak about the steps we have taken to combat unlawful content on our platform, let me first tell you more about MindGeek and how we operate. MindGeek's flagship video-sharing platform is Pornhub. Created in 2007, Pornhub is a leading free, ad-supported, adult content hosting and streaming website, offering visitors the ability to view content uploaded by verified users, individual content creators and third party studios. Demand for MindGeek's content rivals that of some of the largest social media platforms. For example, in 2020, Pornhub averaged over 4 million unique user sessions per day in Canada alone. In 2020, over 30% of our Canadian visitors were women. Roughly 1.3 million Canadian women visit the site every day.

Running one of the world's most visited websites is a responsibility we do not take lightly. The spread of non-consensual and CSAM content is a massive challenge facing all social media platforms. The U.S.-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, also known as NCMEC, the industry standard for reporting CSAM, says it has received 16.9 million referrals from tech companies about possible child abuse, with well over 90% of those related to a single social media platform. MindGeek is a proud partner of NCMEC. We report every instance of CSAM when we are aware of it, so that this information can be disseminated to and investigated by authorities across the globe.

We share the objectives reflected in the 11 voluntary principles developed by governments, including Canada, to fight online sexual exploitation and abuse. We have been leading this fight by being more vigilant in our moderation than almost any other platform, both within and outside of the adult space.

Today, only professional studios and verified users and creators, whose personal identity and date of birth have been confirmed by MindGeek, may upload content. This means every piece of content on our websites can be traced back to its uploader, whose identity and location are known to us. We are the first and only major social media platform, adult or non-adult, to introduce this policy. We hope and expect that the entire social media industry will follow our lead.

We are also working to ensure that once content is removed, it can never make its way back to our platform or to any platform. The revictimization of individuals when their content is re-uploaded causes profound injury that we are working fiercely to prevent. We are attacking this problem in two ways. First, our people are trained to remove such material upon request. Second, we digitally fingerprint any content removed from our website so that it cannot be re-uploaded to our own platform.

For the last two years, we have been building a tool called “SafeGuard” to help fight the distribution of non-consensual intimate images. As I sit before you today, I am pleased to report that this month we will be implementing SafeGuard for all videos uploaded to Pornhub. We will offer SafeGuard for free to our non-adult peers, including Facebook, YouTube and Reddit. We are optimistic that all major social media platforms will implement SafeGuard and contribute to its fingerprint database. Such co-operation will be a major step to limit the spread of non-consensual material on the Internet.

Mr. Chair, thank you for the opportunity to discuss MindGeek's commitment to trust and safety, including our work to stamp out CSAM and non-consensual material on our platforms and on the Internet as a whole.

We look forward to answering the committee's questions.

Thank you.

1:05 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Chris Warkentin

Thank you, Mr. Antoon.

Were there any additional comments from either of the other two witnesses?

1:05 p.m.

Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

Feras Antoon

No, not for now. We are ready to answer questions.

1:05 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Chris Warkentin

Very good.

We'll turn to Mrs. Stubbs, then, to begin the questioning.

1:05 p.m.

Conservative

Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witness for his statement.

Has MindGeek or any of its at least 48 subsidiaries ever monetized child sexual abuse and non-consensual material?

1:05 p.m.

Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

Feras Antoon

This is a very important question, and I thank you very much for actually starting with it, because that's the core of this meeting. Sexual material, child abuse material has no place on our platform. It makes us lose money. I will walk you through two steps to exactly explain this point.

When you see this kind of material on our website, it completely ruins the brand that we have been trying to build for over a decade. The Pornhub brand, which is known worldwide, has the trust of its users. When the four million Canadians who come daily to Pornhub see this disgusting kind of material, they lose trust and faith in us—

1:10 p.m.

Conservative

Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB

I would agree. I think that's exactly why it's concerning that there is public knowledge of at least 100 such videos. Even just on Monday, this committee heard from a witness that she tried to get removed explicit videos of her when she was 13 years old that were on Pornhub without her consent.

1:10 p.m.

Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

Feras Antoon

I just—

1:10 p.m.

Conservative

Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB

I guess it is the case that MindGeek or any of its at least 48 subsidiaries has monetized child sexual abuse and non-consensual material.

1:10 p.m.

Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

Feras Antoon

We lose money. With every view, a user leaves forever. The user is disgusted and never comes back.

1:10 p.m.

Conservative

Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB

How does MindGeek profit with mostly free content?

1:10 p.m.

Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

Feras Antoon

We are an ad-supported platform. That's how we make our revenues. That's how Pornhub makes its revenues.

Now, MindGeek has other products that are membership-based. We have products where you buy a membership, like Netflix, and that has content that has section 2257 IDs and the consent of all the actors—like Netflix, basically.

The ad-free model is a video-sharing platform. Our rules are very similar to adult and non-adult.... Facebook, YouTube and TikTok have very similar rules to ours. They also have pornographic material. They also report, like us. It is a big issue in the video-sharing platform community today, not only adult.... We recognize that.

1:10 p.m.

Conservative

Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB

What's the percentage of revenue from advertising?

1:10 p.m.

Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

Feras Antoon

Off the top of my head, I believe it's approximately 50%.

1:10 p.m.

Conservative

Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB

Your company has an incredibly and almost incomprehensibly complex corporate structure. Can you explain why?

1:10 p.m.

Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

Feras Antoon

Yes, I can walk you through it.

MindGeek is headquartered in Luxembourg. MindGeek Europe comprises four offices: Luxembourg, the U.K., Cyprus and Romania. We have 800 people in Europe. MindGeek Europe owns all the IP, trademarks and copyrights of all our products and platforms. Pornhub, for example, is owned by MindGeek Europe.

The Canadian subsidiary has 1,000 employees based in Montreal. The Canadian entity is a service entity that supplies services to all the European entities, for example Pornhub. The services provided on the platform are from Montreal. Those services include management, customer care and engineering. The Montreal office, which has 1,000 employees, has around 400 engineers.

1:10 p.m.

Conservative

Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB

Do any of the websites run by this extremely complex structure currently have child sexual abuse or non-consensual material in them?

1:10 p.m.

Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

Feras Antoon

There should be zero child sexual abuse material on our website, and if there's—

1:10 p.m.

Conservative

Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB

How do you know?

1:10 p.m.

Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

Feras Antoon

It's because every single piece of content is viewed by our human moderators. Number two, it goes through software that we have licensed from YouTube, like CSAI Match, and from Microsoft, like PhotoDNA for pictures. It goes through a software called Vobile.

1:10 p.m.

Conservative

Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB

But then why, for example, do Pornhub's terms of service say, “we sometimes review Content submitted or contributed by users”?

1:10 p.m.

David Tassillo Chief Operating Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

Mrs. Stubbs, I would like to add to what Feras mentioned.

I'm not too sure where it says that in the terms of service, but I can guarantee you that every piece of content, before it's actually made available on the website, goes through several different filters, some of which my colleague made reference to.

Depending on whether it comes up as a photo or as a video, we go through different pieces of software that would compare it to known active cases of CSAM, so we'll actually do a hash check. We actually don't send the content itself over; they create a digital key per se that's compared to a known active database. After that, it's compared to the other piece of software that Feras mentioned, Vobile, which is a fingerprinting software by which anyone can have their content fingerprinted. Any time MindGeek would find the piece of infringing content, we'd add it to that database to prevent the re-upload.

Once it passes the software queue.... If anything fails at the software level, it automatically doesn't make it up to the site. Once that piece has gone through, we move over to the human moderation section. The human moderators will watch each one of the videos, and if they deem that the video passes, it will be—

1:10 p.m.

Conservative

Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB

Do they watch it with sound on?

1:10 p.m.

Chief Operating Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada

David Tassillo

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't—