44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 9, 2024 10:00AM
He said: Madam Speaker, imagine being the parent of a teenage daughter who has been missing for months and somebody discovers 50 explicit videos of that daughter being sexually abused on Pornhub, the most popular porn site in the world. Imagine how one would feel if intimate images of one's sibling was uploaded and Pornhub refused one's request to remove that content. Now, imagine if those videos of their exploited loved ones were being monetized and published for profit by Pornhub and were made available to Pornhub's over 130 daily visitors.
How would someone feel if Pornhub’s only response was an auto-reply email? Understandably, one would be outraged. One would be furious, yet this happens over and over. Survivors, including a 12-year-old from Ontario, have had to seek justice through their own lawsuits because in Canada, the onus is on survivors and on law enforcement to prove, after the material has been uploaded, that the individuals depicted in those videos are either under age or have not consented to their distribution. This is a serious problem that Bill C-270, the stopping internet sexual exploitation act, seeks to fix.
it’s important to note that for years, survivors, child protection agencies and the police have spoken out about this exploitation. They have not been silent. Survivors have shared how pornographic companies like Pornhub have been profiting from content depicting minors, sex trafficking victims, sexual assault, intimate images and gender-based violence for years. As early as 2019, companies like PayPal cut ties with MindGeek due to the availability of exploitive and abusive content.
In March 2020, a few parliamentarians and I wrote a public letter to the Prime Minister to alert him about the exploitation that was happening on MindGeek. We followed up in November 2020 with a letter to the then Minister of Justice, urging him to ensure that our laws were adequate to prevent women and girls from being exploited by Pornhub.
It was The New York Times exposé on December 4, 2020, in a piece written by Nicholas Kristof, that finally got the public's and the government’s attention. It was entitled “The Children of Pornhub: Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?” That article finally kicked off a firestorm of international attention on Pornhub, which is one of many pornographic websites owned by MindGeek, a Canadian company based in Montreal. About a year ago, it was bought and rebranded as Aylo by a company called Ethical Capital Partners, based in Ottawa.
A few days after that article, the House of Commons ethics committee initiated an investigation into Pornhub. I joined the ethics committee for its study on Pornhub and listened to the harrowing stories of young women who had videos of sexual assaults or intimate content shared without their consent. Many of these women were minors when the videos were created and uploaded to pornography sites like Pornhub. I want to take a moment to share some of their testimony.
Serena Fleites, whose story was covered by The New York Times exposé, had videos of her at age 13 uploaded by her ex-boyfriend. After that, her whole life came crumbling down. She experienced depression and drug use. She was harassed by people at her school who found her video and sent it to family members. She was blackmailed. She had to pretend to be her mother to have the videos taken down from Pornhub. This was all while she was 13 years old. In the end, she stopped going to school. She told us:
I thought that once I stopped being in the public so much, once I stopped going to school, people would stop re-uploading it. But that didn't happen, because it had already been basically downloaded by [all the] people...[in] the world. It would always be uploaded, over and over and over again. No matter how many times I got it taken down, it would be right back up again.
It basically became a full-time job for her to just chase down those images and to get them removed from Pornhub.
Some witnesses appeared anonymously to protect their identities. One witness stated, “I was 17 when videos of me on Pornhub came to my knowledge, and I was only 15 in the videos they [were] profiting from.” She went on to say, “Every time they took it down, they also allowed more and more videos of me to be reuploaded.” That witness also said, “Videos of me being on Pornhub has affected my life so much to the point that I don't leave my house anymore. I stopped being able to work because I [am]...scared to be out in public around other people.”
Another survivor who spoke to us at committee is Victoria Galy. As a result of discovering non-consensual images and videos of herself on Pornhub, she completely lost her sense of self-worth, and at times, she was suicidal. She told us at committee, “There were over eight million views just on Pornhub alone. To think of the amount of money that Pornhub has made off my trauma, date rape and sexual exploitation makes me sick to my stomach.” She added, “I have been forced to stand up alone and fight Pornhub”.
It is a serious failure of our justice system when survivors have to launch their own lawsuits to get justice for the harms caused by companies like MindGeek. This Canadian company has not faced a single charge or consequence in Canada for publishing its videos of exploitation and for profiting from them. This is truly shameful.
Last year, a survivor named Uldouz Wallace reached out to me. Uldouz is a survivor of the 2014 iCloud hack. She is also an award-winning actress, executive producer, activist and director of Foundation RA. Uldouz had photos and videos taken in the 2014 iCloud hack and uploaded onto porn sites like Pornhub, and she fought for years to get them taken down. As a result of this, she told us, “I lost followers, I lost everything that you could think of. It was just such hard time for me. I ended up spending over a million dollars over a three-year span just to get the content taken down on me with no success.... They're making so much money off of the non-consensual uploading of images and videos. The re-uploading is also a billion dollar industry.” She added, “There's still no federal laws. There's barely any laws at all to hold anyone online accountable. There's currently foreign revenge laws but for people like me there's nothing.”
Rachel, a survivor from Alberta, said that it was devastating and that it is going to haunt her for the rest of her life. She said that she will always be someone's porn.
I want to point out the incredible courage of Victoria, Serena, Uldouz, Rachel and many other survivors who have spoken out. In the midst of one of the most difficult moments of their lives, they are fighting back against a billion-dollar industry that seeks to profit from their pain and exploitation. I thank Victoria, Serena, Uldouz, and Rachel for refusing to back down. I thank them for their courage. I thank them for their relentless pursuit of justice. I would encourage members to listen to their full testimonies, and they can do so at www.siseact.ca.
Throughout the ethics committee hearings and from the interactions I have had with survivors since, it is clear that this is a common problem. Pornographic companies are publishing and monetizing content without verifying the age and the consent of the people depicted in them. This is particularly a problem for Canada as many of those websites are hosted here.
Bill C-270, the stopping Internet sexual exploitation act, would stop this. I am going to quote right from the summary of my bill. It states that the SISE act would:
...prohibit a person [including companies] from making, distributing or advertising pornographic material for commercial purposes without having first ascertained that, at the time the material was made, each person whose image is depicted in the material was 18 years of age or older and gave their express consent to their image being depicted.
The SISE act would also allow individuals to revoke their consent. This is an important part to express the ongoing consent. Finally, the SISE act would provide for aggravating factors when the material created or published actually depicts minors or non-consensual activity.
I am also pleased to share that I consulted on the bill with a variety of child protection agencies, law enforcement groups and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection to ensure that there are no gaps and that police have the tools to ensure they can seek justice.
The heart of the bill is consent. No one should be publishing sexually explicit material without the express consent of everyone depicted in that material. Children cannot consent to exploitation. Victims of sex trafficking and sexual assault cannot consent. Those filmed without their knowledge cannot consent, yet pornography companies freely publish this content and profit from it because there is no onus on them to verify the age or the consent of those depicted.
That is why the second recommendation of the 2021 ethics committee report is:
That the Government of Canada mandate that content-hosting platforms operating in Canada require affirmation from all persons depicted in pornographic content, before it can be uploaded, that they are 18 years old or older and that they consent to its distribution, and that it consult with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada with respect to the implementation of such obligation.
We have heard from survivors who testified that their images of abuse would not be online if companies like Pornhub had bothered to check for age and consent. Bill C-270 would fulfill this important recommendation from the ethics committee report and, importantly, I should add that this report was unanimously supported by all parties at the ethics committee.
The recommendation also suggests consulting with the Privacy Commissioner. I happy to share with my colleagues that on February 29, 2024, the Privacy Commissioner released his investigation into Pornhub's operator Aylo, formerly MindGeek. The report was initially scheduled to be released on May 23, but it was delayed for over nine months when MindGeek, or Aylo, and its owners, Ethical Capital Partners took the Privacy Commissioner to court to block the release of that report.
The Privacy Commissioner’s investigation into Aylo, MindGeek, was in response to a woman whose ex-boyfriend had uploaded intimate images of her to MindGeek's website without her consent. The young woman had to use a professional service to get it taken down and to remove her images from approximately 80 websites, where they had been re-posted more than 700 times.
The report shared how the publishing of the woman’s intimate images led to a permanent loss of control of the images, which had a devastating effect on her. It caused her to withdraw from her social life and to live in a state of fear and anxiety. The Commissioner stated:
This untenable situation could have been avoided in many cases had MindGeek obtained direct consent from each individual depicted in content prior to or at the time of upload.
Pornhub’s own Monthly Non-Consensual Content reports suggest that non-consensual content is still regularly uploaded and viewed by thousands of users before it is removed.
We find that by continuing to rely solely on the uploader to verify consent, MindGeek fails to ensure that it has obtained valid and meaningful consent from all individuals depicted in content uploaded to its websites.
Ultimately, the Privacy Commissioner recommended that Pornhub and its owners adopt measures that would verify age and consent before any content is uploaded. I would urge all members to read the Privacy Commissioner's report on Pornhub.
While Pornhub and its owners are the biggest pornography company in the world, this bill would ensure that age verification and consent applies to all pornography companies because whether it is videos of child exploitation, sex trafficking, AI deepfakes, sexual assault or an intimate encounter filmed by a partner, once a video or image has been uploaded, it is virtually impossible to eliminate. Each video can be viewed and downloaded millions of times within a 24-hour period, starting an endless nightmare for victims who must fight to get those videos removed, only for them to be uploaded again within minutes or hours.
Canada must do more to prevent this exploitive content from ever reaching the Internet in the first place. I hope I have the support of my colleagues in ending this nightmare for so many and in preventing it for so many more. To the survivors, some of whom are watching today, we thank them. Their voices are being heard.
I want to thank the organizations that have supported me along the way in getting this bill to this point: National Centre on Sexual Exploitation, National Council of Women of Canada, Ottawa Coalition to End Human Trafficking, London Abused Women's Centre, Defend Dignity, Vancouver Collective Against Sexual Exploitation, The Salvation Army, Survivor Safety Matters, Foundation RA, Montreal Council of Women, CEASE UK, Parents Aware, Joy Smith Foundation, Hope Resource Centre Association, Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, Colchester Sexual Assault Centre, Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Services of Halton, and Ally Global Foundation.
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Madam Speaker, on November 21, 2022, a team from the TV show Envoyé spécial travelled from Paris to my office on the Hill. The France 2 team was there for a major investigation into Pornhub and the tragic experience of women and girls being sexually exploited by massive online pornography companies for profit.
The French public television team wanted to see me because, during the 43rd Parliament, I was a member of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, where we studied this unbelievable industry. I would actually describe this industry as disgusting, and people can understand why. It exploits and abuses women to create and distribute pornographic content with neither their knowledge nor their consent. I was absolutely shocked by what I heard.
The committee heard from Serena Fleites, whose story was reported in a New York Times article. According to the article, the 14-year-old found herself in sexually explicit videos uploaded to Pornhub. It is abominable.
I was also shocked by when the administrators of MindGeek, the parent company behind Pornhub, whose office was in Montreal at the time, came before the committee. I was stunned by the administrators' pathological lack of consideration for victims. As far as they were concerned, it was not really their fault if those videos ended up on their platform, and it would not harm their lives. It was appalling.
The work we did in committee on Pornhub's practices enabled every member from every party present to understand the dubious mechanisms by which platforms distributing pornographic material get rich by exploiting the flaws in a technological system that is far from being able to control the content being distributed. In fact, it is built and designed to encourage criminal sexual exploitation practices by covering them up.
The committee I was on heard about the failure of moderation. We were told that the content was moderated, that people's privacy and reputations were protected. We heard about the failure to prevent the presence of child sexual exploitation material, despite the claims of the MindGeek representatives who testified in committee.
The committee made a number of recommendations, including the following: We must now, as a matter of urgency, pass legislation to respond to these crimes and deal with these troubling issues. I would remind the House that this study took place during the 43rd Parliament, which ran from 2019 to 2021. Now it is 2024. We had to wait for a bill from a Conservative member before we could finally talk about it in Parliament. What is the government waiting for? We are talking about human dignity. Young girls are having their reputations tarnished. Young people are committing suicide because they have been manipulated and cheated, because people have abused their trust. This has to stop.
I am going to give some figures on what happened from 2014 to 2022. This is important because we will understand the seriousness of the situation. Police reported 15,630 incidents of online sexual offences against children and 48,816 incidents of online child pornography.
The rate of police-reported online child sexual exploitation has risen since 2014, reaching 160 cases per 100,000 Canadian children and youth in 2022. Between 2014 and 2022, making and distributing child pornography accounted for three-quarters of child pornography cases, while possessing or accessing child pornography accounted for the remainder. The rate of online child pornography increased 290% in that short period of time.
Girls were overrepresented as victims for all offence types over the nine-year period. The majority of victims of police-reported online sexual offences against children were girls, particularly girls between the ages of 12 and 17.
Incidents of non-consensual distribution of intimate images most often involved a youth victim and a youth accused. Nearly all—97%—child and youth victims between 2015 and 2022 were aged 12 to 17 years, with a median age of 15 years for girls and 14 years for boys. Nine in ten accused persons were minors. For one-third of youth victims, a casual acquaintance shared the victim's intimate images with others. The goal is that once the image has been uploaded, it can be uploaded again, even months after it has been viewed.
I am calling on my colleagues to refer this bill to committee so that it may be improved and become an example to the world. We must no longer allow sexual exploitation.
Bill C‑270 “amends the Criminal Code to prohibit a person from making, distributing or advertising pornographic material for commercial purposes without having first ascertained that, at the time the material was made, each person whose image is depicted in the material was 18 years of age or older and gave their express consent to their image being depicted.” To me, that is essential.
The voluntary agreement, in writing, of the person whose image is depicted in the pornographic material will be required before the content can be uploaded to the platforms.
Makers and distributors who do not comply with the requirements of the legislation will be subject to fines of up to half a million dollars and a prison sentence of up to two years. Alternatively, the offence may be punishable on summary conviction and liable to a fine of not more than $100,000. What is more, convicted distributors or makers will be subject to an order.
I could go on at length, but I have only 30 seconds left. I just want to close by saying that this is a serious subject that raises a lot of questions, that this bill must be referred to committee and that the Bloc Québécois will vote in favour of it.
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