Porn companies need to take strong measures to protect privacy and prevent future damage – Dal News

Elaine Craig is a law teacher at Dalhousie University.

At a time of increased emphasis on Canadian purchasePorn consumers in the country can rest easily. A Canadian business, Capital Partners Ethics (ECP)He owns the largest porn website in the world, Pornhub. But Canadian porn users don’t have to worry?

On March 3, Announced Canada’s Privacy Commissioner That Pornhub practices fail to ensure that the significant consent has been obtained from all those who appear in videos uploaded on the platform and that it will request a decision of the federal court directing Pornhub to comply with Canada’s confidentiality.

When ECP purchased Aylo (then called Mindgeek), which owns Pornhub and other porn businesses, the company has made numerous public statements. ECP executives said in a statement that Aylo was “Built on a reliable, safety and compliance basis. “Also, ECP directors said they are sure that the company operates”legal and responsible. “

However, class actions and individual processes brought by women who support distributed videos pornhub, without their consent, Reports in 2020 about children’s rape videos on the platform and charges of Pirate with widespread content Do not align with ECP statements about Pornhub’s origins.

The report of the Privacy Commissioner

The ECP statement that Pornhub was built on confidence and safety is also rejected by the confidentiality commissioner’s findings. In 2024 Commissioner Philippe Dufresne launched a Critical report As for Aylo, following a complaint by a woman who supported her ex-boyfriend she loaded an explicit sexual video about her in 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, the Pornhub process was posted to ensure consent was “entirely inefficient” and that it had “devastating consequences for thousands of people whose intimate images were shared” without their knowledge and consent.

Dufresne said that the company still fails “to ensure that it has obtained the valid and significant consent from all the people depicted in content loaded on its web sites.” He maintained this position In his March 2 announcement, which challenges the commissioner’s findings, launched unsuccessful legal procedures for prevention Dufresne’s report to be published, delaying his launch almost a year.

Many women claimed Terrible stories about their efforts to eliminate videos from Pornhub that they have not agreed (or, in some cases, even created), just to be greeted late, lack of response and administrative obstacles.

Today, Pornhub systems to check consent And the response to take -off requests is significantly more robust; They are probably superior to the mechanisms used by other platforms. But the processes, Testimony from victimized women And the report of the Commissioner suggests that this is hardly a company “based on a reliable, safety and compliance.” And according to Dufresne, Pornhub does not yet comply with the law.

Harmful content

When they purchased the company, ECP executives said the media -media They bought Aylo to promote “entertainment for consensual and sexual adults”. Academic research, including mineHe examined the content on porn platforms depicting the sexual aggression of sleep or unconscious women, sexual abuse of children by fathers or step materials and the use of misogynistic meta-dates, labels and content categories to promote content to users.

The representations, including the fictitious ones, of sexual aggression by step proportions against stepmother or sexual acts imposed on sleeping women, are not positive sexual. The use of misogynous titles and video tags to organize and amplify ugly statements about women and teenage girls is not positive.

Polish moderation policies Pornhub forbid this type of harmful content. If Pornhub has constantly applied his own rules regarding the representations of unconsensible sex, hate discourse and community standards, sexual aggression representations and titles, labels and porn categories I found in my research would not be present.

The company could do this, In view of his claim that each content on his site is approved by human moderatorsand the success he had in relation to other platforms in Eliminating and preventing sexual abuse materials on children.

The injuries presented by fictitious representations of sexual aggression and the use of misogynite titles and labels to promote porn, are significantly increased because of the nature of today’s porn business. Porn has changed enormously In the last decade. Has become social media.

Porn as social media

As Big Technology in general, in particular, in particular, in social media, The porn industry is modeled By optimizing search engines, algorithms, data and advertising income that drives on the Internet the economy of attention. As a result, porn is now available free for anyone has a mobile phone, Exploding consumption rates. And like other forms of social media, porn today is interactive.

These technological changes In the porn industry it reveals that if easily accessible, many people will follow porn. Indeed, Almost 10 % by Canadians visit Pornhub every day.

The ubiquity of contemporary porn and social media character Improve a lot Its ability to model our sexual culture, including in harmful ways. A wide social involvement with any practice, including the consumption of sexually explicit materials, informs our relationships, norms and values. The erosion of sexual aggression of unconscious women or stepdaughters or the implementation of misogynistic hatred discourse, endure and arouse great segments of our communities, shapes how we understand and relate to consent, accusations of sexual aggression and concepts of sexual desire.

There is nothing inherently harmful in viewing porn and not all porn contributes negatively to our social environment. However, ECP statements about the history of the largest porn company in the world suggest a lack of responsibility in terms of extraordinary injury That porn websites cause women and girls.

Transparency and responsibility

Given the increased role of porn in outlining our sexual culture in a The company of the platformThe content that depicts sexual aggression or is in the language of misogyny is harmful to us all. This is probably why Pornhub policies prohibit this type of content. But the rules for moderation of content are as good as their application.

ECP says he rebranded Aylo to reflect a “renewed commitment to … trust and safety” and to allow the “company to reorient its efforts to lead by example through transparency and public involvement.” The type of leadership that ECP considers requires a commitment to the truth and the availability to rigorously support its own rules: the type of commitment and will exposed by the Confidentiality Commissioner of Canada, in this case.

In order to “lead by example”, the ECP should start with transparency and right public responsibility in terms of the foundations that Pornhub has actually built and how she worked for many years. This must be followed by complying with the recommendations of the privacy commissioner and the insistence that the Pornhub Content Moderation policies are applied constantly and rigorously.

This article is republished from conversation under Creative Commons license. Read Original article.