On March 8, International Women’s Day, I joined in a protest in Montreal in front of the offices of MindGeek, the company that dominates the porn market. Its flagship property Pornhub is one of the most popular porn sites in the world, hosting 6 million videos a year that get 42 billion views. It is known as the YouTube of porn, because anyone can easily upload their own porn videos and it is free to access. It makes money from ads. The videos are hard-core porn and often degrade women, and 71% of the viewers are male.

The pornography industry is legal, of course, but the question is, are all of the people involved in these sex acts consenting adults? The answer is no. There have been documented cases of sexual exploitation, and they are revolting.

In October 2019, a 15-year-old American teen who had been missing for a year was finally found. She was featured in 58 — I repeat, 58 — porn videos, some of which were posted on Pornhub. The trafficker has been charged with rape.

MindGeek says it quickly pulls suspicious or illegal content from its platforms as soon as it is flagged and claims it is instituting improved detection technologies to verify the identity of the participants appearing in the videos.

In a matter of minutes, The Times, a British newspaper, found dozens of examples of videos showing the sexual exploitation of minors on Pornhub. Some of these videos had been viewed by 350,000 people and had been online for three years. Three of the worst examples that were reported to Pornhub were still up on the site 24 hours later. Why isn’t Pornhub doing all the necessary identity checks before agreeing to post videos? MindGeek says it only checks the identity of one person, the person who opens an account and who posts videos minutes later depicting other people whose age and identity have never been verified.

Unfortunately, that is the norm. Self-regulation is not working, and too few laws have been passed to govern the practices of these types of sites in the name of freedom of expression. It is time to impose liability on internet middlemen and pass laws, because the safety of women and children depends on it.

Thank you.