Porn companies must take strong action to protect privacy and prevent future harms

At a time of increased emphasis on buying Canadian, the country’s porn consumers can presumably rest easy. A Canadian business, Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), owns the world’s largest porn website, Pornhub. But do Canadian porn users have nothing to worry about?

On March 3, Canada’s privacy commissioner announced that Pornhub’s practices fail to ensure meaningful consent has been obtained from everyone appearing in videos uploaded to the platform, and that he will seek a federal court order directing Pornhub to comply with Canada’s privacy laws.

When ECP acquired Aylo (then called MindGeek), which owns Pornhub and other porn businesses, the company made numerous public statements. ECP’s executives stated in a release that Aylo was “built upon a foundation of trust, safety and compliance.” ECP executives also stated they were confident the company operates “legally and responsibly.”

However, class actions and individual lawsuits brought by women who allege Pornhub distributed videos of them without their consent, reports in 2020 of child rape videos on the platform and allegations of widespread content piracy do not align with ECP’s claims about Pornhub’s origins.

Privacy commissioner’s report

ECP’s assertion that Pornhub was built on trust and safety is also refuted by the privacy commissioner’s findings. In 2024, Commissioner Philippe Dufresne released a critical report regarding Aylo, following a complaint by a woman who alleged her ex-boyfriend uploaded a sexually explicit video of her to 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, Pornhub’s process for ensuring consent was “wholly ineffective,” and that this had “devastating consequences for thousands of individuals whose intimate images were shared” without their knowledge and consent.

Dufresne stated the company was still failing “to ensure that it has obtained valid and meaningful consent from all individuals depicted in content uploaded to its websites.” He maintained this position in his announcement on March 2. ECP, which disputes the commissioner’s findings, launched unsuccessful legal proceedings to prevent Dufresne’s report from being published, delaying its release by nearly a year.

Numerous women have alleged horrific stories about their efforts to have videos removed from Pornhub that they did not consent to have uploaded (or in some cases, even created), only to be met with delay, a lack of response and administrative obstacles.

Today, Pornhub’s systems for verifying consent and responding to take-down requests are significantly more robust; they are likely superior to the mechanisms used by other platforms. But the lawsuits, testimony from victimized women and the commissioner’s report suggest this is hardly a company “built upon a foundation of trust, safety and compliance.” And according to the Dufresne, Pornhub is still not compliant with the law.

Harmful content

When they acquired the company, ECP executives told the media they bought Aylo to promote “consensual and sex-positive adult entertainment.” Academic research, including my own, has examined content on porn platforms that depicts the sexual assault of sleeping or unconscious women, the sexual abuse of children by their fathers or step-fathers and the use of misogynistic meta-data — video titles, tags, and content categories — to promote content to users.

Depictions, including fictional ones, of sexual assault by step-fathers against step-daughters, or of sexual acts imposed upon sleeping women, are not sex-positive. Using misogynistic video titles and tags to organize and amplify hateful assertions about women and adolescent girls is not sex-positive.

Pornhub’s content moderation policies prohibit this type of harmful content. If Pornhub consistently enforced its own rules regarding depictions of non-consensual sex, hate speech and community standards, the depictions of sexual assault and the hateful and discriminatory titles, tags and categories of porn that I found in my research would not be present.

The company could presumably do this, given its claim that every piece of content on its site is approved by human moderators, and the success it has had relative to other platforms in eliminating and preventing child sexual abuse material.

The harms posed by fictional depictions of sexual assault, and the use of misogynistic titles and tags to promote porn, are significantly heightened because of the nature of the porn business today. Porn has changed enormously in the last decade. It has become social media.

Porn as social media

Like big tech generally, and social media in particular, the porn industry is shaped by search engine optimization, algorithms, data and the advertising revenue that drives the internet’s attention economy. As a result, porn is now freely available to anyone with a cellphone, exploding rates of consumption. And like other forms of social media, porn today is interactive.

These technological changes in the porn industry reveal that, if made easily accessible, many people will watch porn. Indeed, close to 10 per cent of Canadians visit Pornhub every day.

Contemporary porn’s ubiquity and social media character greatly enhance its capacity to shape our sexual culture, including in harmful ways. Broad social engagement with any practice, including the consumption of sexually explicit material, informs our relationships, norms and values. Eroticizing the sexual assault of unconscious women or step-daughters, or deploying misogynistic hate speech to shock, entice and arouse large segments of our communities, shapes how we understand and relate to consent, allegations of sexual assault and concepts of sexual desire.

There is nothing inherently harmful about watching porn, and not all porn contributes negatively to our social environment. However, ECP’s claims about the history of the world’s largest porn company suggest a lack of accountability regarding the tremendous harm that porn websites cause women and girls.

Transparency and accountability

Given porn’s heightened role in shaping our sexual culture in a platform society, content that depicts sexual assault or is framed in the language of misogyny is harmful to all of us. Presumably, this is why Pornhub’s policies prohibit this type of content. But content moderation rules are only as good as their enforcement.

ECP says it rebranded Aylo to reflect a “renewed commitment to…trust and safety” and to allow “the company to refocus its efforts to lead by example through transparency and public engagement.” The type of leadership that ECP contemplates requires a commitment to the truth and a willingness to rigorously uphold one’s own rules: the kind of commitment and willingness exhibited by Canada’s privacy commissioner, in this case.

To “lead by example,” ECP should start with transparency and forthright public accountability regarding the foundations upon which Pornhub was actually built and how it operated for many years. This must be followed by compliance with the privacy commissioner’s recommendations, and insistence that Pornhub’s content moderation policies are consistently and rigorously enforced.