Campaigning Against PornHub / MindGeek in Canada

By Rafaela Diaz-Byers

My name is Rafaela and I live in Montreal, Canada. A few months ago, I learned about the company Pornhub and the videos hosted on its servers of women being raped, of underage girls being trafficked, of revenge porn and spy cams. These were people experiencing real trauma whose videos had been uploaded and shared for anyone to get pleasure from without consent. 

I then went on to discover that Pornhub was owned by MindGeek, a Montreal founded company who still have their green-tinted, mirrored-glass headquarters right in the heart of the city. MindGeek very innocently call themselves a “tech company,” but they don’t say what kind of “tech” they do, and that they own the majority of the global porn industry. They not only own popular porn sites, but film studios, and production companies. I couldn’t believe that this porn empire was right here in my own city, and that it was becoming common knowledge that their site Pornhub enables, hosts, and profits from the exploitation of non-consensual porn, trafficking, child-sex abuse, and rape. And how do they fail to prohibit these kinds of videos? Because Pornhub is made up of user generated content that are supposedly screened by a team of human moderators whose job it is to guess a person's age. Wow, what a fool proof method!  

Right now on Pornhub, there is pornography featuring:

  • Incest

  • Racial slurs

  • Homeless teens

  • Drunk women/girls being sexually assaulted

  • Kidnapping 

  • Forced sex (i.e. rape)

  • Revenge porn

  • Spy cam footage

This content is damaging men and young people because they eroticize and encourage violence against women and girls. Last year, the horrifying story of a 15-year-old girl in the US came out- she had been missing for a year and was finally found after her mother was alerted that she was featured in videos on Pornhub. 58 videos were discovered on the site of her rape and sexual abuse, and all this was being consumed by a global audience. 

Stories like this are more common than you think. 

Pornhub themselves admitted to having child sexual abuse videos on their site, yet told a 10Daily reporter that the Internet Watch Foundation’s discovery of 100 videos of children being sexually abused, barely made up less than one percent of their content. But shouldn't even one percent be unacceptable? 

All this made me sick to the stomach and I knew I wanted to do something to stop these human rights violations. 

So in September I started a small campaign. As COVID was consuming everyone’s minds, a group of us, total amateurs, began protesting. We named our ourselves Arrêter ExploitationHub, a Quebec focused, non-religious, non-partisan campaign seeking to stop exploitation in our city and in Canada. 

Since then we’ve gained momentum and at the same time it seems like the rest of Canada have too. In October, Bill S-203 was tabled by Quebec Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, calling for an act to restrict young persons’ online access to sexually explicit material in Canada. It feels like we are slowly waking up, and that people are finally starting to listen. 

So here we are a couple of months later. Every Thursday we stand outside MindGeek headquarters with posters showing the company that we know what they’re doing and we aren’t going to let them get away with it. From 3pm - 5pm we demand justice for victims who are mostly young girls, and we ask our governments to form protective legislation for women and children in Canada. We raise awareness of the harm caused to men, women and children around the world by sites such as Pornhub, by how it normalises and propagates violence against women for the purpose of money and pleasure. 

Come rain or shine, come winter, come snow, we will be there, every Thursday, standing up for those who are, even today, victims of sexual exploitation. 

Ça suffit! We’ve had enough!

 

For updates on our campaign follow us on twitter https://twitter.com/exploitationhub

For our weekly Thursday protest information https://fb.me/e/4woJxpui6

To sign the global TraffickingHub petition to shut down Pornhub sign here https://traffickinghubpetition.com