Information & Ethics Committee on Feb. 22nd, 2021

[Daniel Bernhard]

My understanding is that they would not. My understanding is that even in the United States, there is an exception to section 230 for child sexual abuse material, so even under the safe harbour laws of the United States, they would not be protected. Ultimately, Mr. Angus, I would hope it would be a judge who would decide this, and the lack of charges here is particularly concerning to me. It appears to be in clear violation of the law, but that's not something that I am able to pronounce upon, and so, the police, law enforcement, prosecutors and judges really need to get involved here, because it does appear to be a very clear violation of the law.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Brenda Shanahan]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Angus.

We now turn to Mr. Viersen for five minutes.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Ms. McDonald, your organization has done fantastic work. I had the opportunity to visit your facility a number of years back and I got to see Project Arachnid in action even though there's not much to see when you're at the facility. It's a bunch of lights blinking on computers.

Nonetheless, recently the Canadian Centre for Child Protection took steps to distance itself from an international group that has received donations from MindGeek. Can you explain why you took this step, and would you consider MindGeek a partner in any way?

[Lianna McDonald]

Yes, what ended up happening, we didn't realize at the time, when the organization.... The international association you're talking about is INHOPE. The organization had taken a donation from a company called MindGeek. At the time, we did not understand the business structure and what all that meant. As soon as our organization became aware that this company owned a number of adult pornography sites, we immediately made the decision to take away our sort of membership there. It was a very important decision for our organization because we deal with survivors and victims, and many of them are teens. Many of them had come in to us also talking about their victimization on these types of sites.

Also, I just have to raise—because it's not subject to the conversation that we're having right now—that we have a huge issue with the lack of age verification. We have Canadians coming in telling us that their 13-year-old or 12-year-old son was able to go straight into a really graphic web page called Pornhub. From our organization's standpoint, we could not continue with that, so we did make that difficult decision. We worked with hotlines around the world. We do in other capacities and we'll continue to do so because it's in the best interest of children. That was why we made the decision.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Mr. Richardson, I'll ask you this seeing as you're the tech guy here.

The big trouble we've been studying here at this committee is around this, the age and the consent of folks who are depicted in these videos. We hear a lot about how long it took to take the video down and things like that, but certainly there would be methods of ensuring that these videos never show up in the first place.

I was wondering if you could comment on that. If you're bragging that you are the leading tech company in the world, surely there's technology to keep this stuff off the Internet to begin with.

[Lloyd Richardson]

There is, but I would kind of invert that a little bit. It's not a technical issue.

Let's reverse in time to the 1980s before the popularized Internet when we had pornography and we didn't see child sexual abuse material showing up in Playboy magazine. It's not necessarily a technical issue. If you're in fact moderating everything that comes up on your platform, this should never happen. We don't see the CBC show up with child pornography on its services because there's moderation that happens. We have control over the content. That's not to say you can't leverage technology, as we do in Project Arachnid, to do proactive detection of known child sexual abuse material, but really, let's not look at the new and fancy, oh, I have an AI classifier that can automatically detect child pornography. That's great and all, but it's never going to detect everything, and it's not going to have the accuracy that you have of actual human moderators looking at material. It's in addition to something that's already there, so it's important not to belabour the technological side of things.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

All right.

Mr. Bernhard, you looked like you wanted to jump in on that one as well.

[Daniel Bernhard]

It was just to say that I agree. Platforms want to operate at a certain scale, which requires them not to validate any of the content that comes up, yet that seems to result in illegal outcomes, so it's not really for us to say how they should deal with this, but simply that if it's there, they should face the consequences.

To Mr. Richardson's point, I have one final issue. It's not just CBC, CTV, etc., who make sure that their content is lawful. They also have to make sure the advertising that they run is lawful and that op-eds and other third party contributed content are lawful. Otherwise they are jointly liable. This is how the law works, and I see no reason why it shouldn't apply in the case of Pornhub, Facebook, Amazon or any other provider that is recommending and facilitating illegal behaviour through its service.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Mr. Clark, when the executives of Pornhub were here—

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Brenda Shanahan]

Mr. Viersen, you have just a few seconds.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

I'll make it a yes or no answer.

They said that in 2019 they had never reported anything to NCMEC. Can you confirm that as well?

[John F. Clark]

I missed part of your question. You said that was Pornhub?

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Yes.

[John F. Clark]

That is correct; they did not.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Brenda Shanahan]

Thank you very much.

Next up is Mr. Fergus for five minutes.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I thank the witnesses for appearing before us to talk about this topic. I find this testimony terribly hard to hear. Earlier this spring, I attended an international conference involving three countries, Germany, Canada and the United States. We were Zoom-bombed.

We were shown material similar to what you describe, where we saw children, very young people. I have to tell you that it traumatized me at the time. Listening to you and listening to the testimony of the victims over the last few weeks, I have to say I find all these things abominable.

Mr. Bernhard, in your opinion, which country has the best balance in terms of legislation? Which country has laws that are tough enough to fight the distribution of this content, and laws that have enough teeth to sue companies to remove this content from their sites?

[Daniel Bernhard]

I think Canada already has a pretty strong legal regime coming from hundreds of years of common law. The original case we talked about in our report is over 100 years old and comes from Scotland and involves a defamatory notice on a message board.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Absolutely, but I am asking you which country has the best balance. You did say that we don't follow up with our police forces with regard to this type of content, correct?

[Daniel Bernhard]

Yes, I understand.

I think the closest comparison I would give is Germany, which has a strong law, in this case talking about illegal hate speech, but again, illegal content. Platforms that are caught facilitating the transmission of this content can face fines of up to 50 million euros per infraction. That is an example of getting serious. The United Kingdom is also talking about personal liability for online harms, not just for companies but for their individual executives.

Our Nanos polling from the fall shows that Canadians also overwhelmingly support such a move in Canada.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Ms. McDonald and Mr. Richardson, do you have any comments to add?

[Lianna McDonald]

I'll start, and then I'm sure Lloyd will jump in.

It's very difficult to answer that question. The reason it is difficult is that we see so many problems right through the continuum of where action would be taken. Whether it's on the enforcement side, wherever it is, we are quite overwhelmed.

I think part of the challenge is the way in which the Internet was structured. People having the cloak of anonymity and the vast ability to transmit material in these capacities, issues such as end-to-end encryption and other things that are protecting the privacy rights of adults at the expense of the safety and well-being of children, are the common themes.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

I see.

[Lianna McDonald]

Lloyd, do you have a country that you'd like to mention?

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Can you give a short answer, Mr. Richardson? I only have 45 seconds left, and I'd like Mr. Clark to answer that as well.