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.
2:05 p.m.
Liberal
Han Dong Liberal Don Valley North, ON
It has been reported as being in the $460-million range last year. Is that somewhere close?
2:05 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada
I'd have to go back and check.
2:05 p.m.
Liberal
Han Dong Liberal Don Valley North, ON
If I may ask you, how much did your company pay in federal tax last year?
2:05 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada
I don't have the number off the top of my head, but I would like to assure the committee that we have audited financials, consolidated for the entire group worldwide, done by a third party, and we have been doing this for 10 years.
2:05 p.m.
Liberal
Han Dong Liberal Don Valley North, ON
If you could submit that information to the committee, that would be great.
Can you tell us how many videos and images relate to or are tagged as child pornography or have non-consensual acts in them? How many videos? I think that's relevant to what my colleague, MP Erskine-Smith, was asking. Do you have any numbers?
2:05 p.m.
Chief Operating Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada
There should be zero videos tagged under either one of those categories. Those categories are banned from being used on our site, as the keywords are.
2:05 p.m.
Liberal
Han Dong Liberal Don Valley North, ON
That's odd. In the articles we read, they said that if anyone goes on Google and types in those tags of relevant terms, they're provided a link back to your platform. People will click on that, and they'll see those videos. Is that true?
2:05 p.m.
Chief Operating Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada
No, that's not correct. The way the system actually works is that if someone does a search on the site for—
2:05 p.m.
Chief Operating Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada
It's a bit of a technical explanation. That's why I'm going back to the site.
If someone actually does make a search on the site for “Dave”, as an example, and they keep searching on the site for “Dave” over and over, irrespective of whether the content about Dave is on the site, because of the integration done with Google analytics and dynamic searches, Google then indexes that people are attempting to search for that, irrespective of whether the content shows up. Because we're an authority in the adult space, if you follow almost any keyword with the word “adult” or “porn”, basically Google will index.
Now, when you're searching for that word on Google, it might dynamically fill in your search query as if Pornhub has replied. It'll send you to Pornhub, but it doesn't mean that content is actually there. Now, if it's a banned word—
2:05 p.m.
Liberal
Han Dong Liberal Don Valley North, ON
What you're saying is that if someone searches from Google and types in the tag, it may take you to a platform, but there shouldn't be any content. Is that what you're saying?
2:05 p.m.
Chief Operating Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada
A lot of times, that's the way dynamic search works.
2:05 p.m.
Liberal
2:05 p.m.
Chief Operating Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada
In the case of banned words, such as “child porn”, we actually go a step further and make sure the page is a “404” on our side, which doesn't resolve, which allows for—
2:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Chris Warkentin
Thank you, Mr. Dong.
You are over time. We'll get back to you if there's additional time.
2:05 p.m.
Conservative
February 5th, 2021 / 2:05 p.m.
Conservative
Jacques Gourde Conservative Lévis—Lotbinière, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am the father of four daughters and grandfather of three granddaughters. I am disappointed with the witnesses before us today. They seem to trivialize the situation and want to defend their business at all costs, and they are doing a very good job.
Here, all parties are unanimous. Faced with the magnitude of the problem, all parliamentarians in Canada are affected right now. I'm not sure whether the witnesses are aware that their site can cause collateral damage to young teenagers who are caught in a maze with no way out; they don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. This causes major problems for those kids. It leads to depression, runaways, and in some cases, suicide.
We may never be able to connect the triggers. Your site is probably a trigger for major societal problems. We, as lawmakers, won't be able to keep our eyes closed on the collateral damage you cause for money, just for money. You have set up a site that provides mediocre safeguards, and I'm sure that you have spent more money on legal counsel than on protecting teenagers.
If you still have some ethics and honesty, I would ask you to provide the committee with your budgets for site security, the number of people working on security to protect people who make complaints, and your budgets for legal counsel.
Those working for your company are robots. They are robots who post and repost the content. They sometimes prevent certain content from being posted, but when that content makes money, the robots put it back into the system or accept it. This is inconceivable, it's just to make money. You're not protecting Canadians, our teens are getting into something they cannot get out of, and their lives are being affected. If you still have any ethics, set up a program to help them. When a teenager calls you to say that a video has been posted without her knowledge, that she doesn't consent and asks you to remove it, remove it.
What are you going to do to get rid of those videos?
2:10 p.m.
Chief Operating Officer, Entreprise MindGeek Canada
Mr. Gourde, I genuinely as an individual, and as a parent and just as a person, understand your frustration. I genuinely do.
I'm going to try to address each piece of the question that you had.
We do have all the systems in place. Well, you will never have it all. It's always going to be an evolution. Right now, an end-user, if they do see something on the site—I want to reiterate—they can fill out the form and the content will be disabled. There is actually no human intervention. You could go right now to the site, fill out a content removal form, and the content will be removed immediately. I can't stop it; Feras can't stop it; nobody can stop it. It will happen on its own.
We are not making any attempt to make anything difficult for any end-user to take anything down. We understand the responsibility we have. We take it very seriously. We will continue to, and we will continue to add new features.
That's one of the reasons why we made this large step we did in December to change it to deter people further from misusing our platform. We made it so that if you're going to upload anything to the site, I need to know who that person is. We are now making it obligatory, for anyone who uploads to the site, that we have to have the government-issued ID of the individual uploading to the site, so that if someone does misuse the site and does use our platform to commit a crime, we are able to help law enforcement get to the bottom of it, irrespective of where they are in the world. We keep this information now. And even prior to this, we always worked with all law enforcement.
I know we keep going back to the testimony of Monday. We will continue to look into this investigation as more information is made available to us. We just cannot track it down right now. We're not saying it's not true. We just can't track it down right now.
As for the amount of money that we put into fighting these issues, the number is large. I think last year—I'm saying this as an estimate; I'm not 100% sure—it was roughly $10 million Canadian, and it continues to grow every year. We will continue to invest money into it. We're always looking for the best place to put the money.
We're working with a new provider that we found in the last 3-4 months that is able to work on even the comment engine to see if people are putting in negative comments and use that as a lead to potentially trigger that there's something wrong with this piece of content. There have been instances in our past when even our human moderators—because we do go back and check the comments manually; we don't have an automated system—actually caught it on the evidence of a comment, someone saying something like, “This person looks young” or “That doesn't make sense.” We would review it and take it down if we felt that was the case.
So we are committed to this.
2:15 p.m.
Liberal
Francesco Sorbara Liberal Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON
Thank you, Chair, and good afternoon, everyone.
It's easy for many of us to personalize today's committee meeting. Obviously many of us are parents. Mr. Gourde is a parent of four daughters, and I have two beautiful young daughters at home. It's very easy to personalize this and understand why we're here and why it's so important we're here. And that goes without saying.
And you folks, Mr. Antoon and Mr. Tassillo, your company has a responsibility. You don't generate the content, but your site—and if it wasn't your site, it would be someone else's site, because someone else would step into that business—has a responsibility of either greenlighting the content or redlighting the content.
I believe Mr. Tassillo mentioned that any content now that is generated must have a human touch to have it then placed on the site. Is that correct?