Good afternoon. My name is Feras Antoon.

I'm the chief executive officer of Entreprise MindGeek Canada. With me are David Tassillo, chief operations officer, and Corey Urman, vice-president of product management, video-sharing platforms. We are grateful to the committee for the opportunity to speak with you today.

MindGeek is one of the largest, most well-known brands in the online adult entertainment space. Our flagship website, Pornhub, is among the top five most visited websites on the Internet. Over 12.5% of the adult Canadian population visit our website every day. As a leader in this industry, we share the committee's concern about the spread of unlawful content online and about the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. It goes against everything we stand for at MindGeek and Pornhub.

When David and I joined MindGeek in 2008, our goal was to create the most inclusive and safe adult community on the Internet. It was designed to celebrate freedom of expression, to value privacy and to empower adults from all walks of life. We knew this could be possible only if safety and security were our top priority. While we have remained steadfast in our commitment to protect our users and the public, we recognize that we could have done more in the past and we must do more in the future.

I want to be clear to every member of this honourable committee, and to the Canadian public, that even a single unlawful or non-consensual image on MindGeek's platforms is one too many, full stop. We are fathers and husbands. We have over 1,800 employees with families and loved ones. We are devastated by what the victims of these heinous acts have gone through. I want to emphasize that this type of material has no place on our platforms and is contrary to our values and our business model. We are sickened when anyone attempts to abuse our platforms to further their violence. Fortunately, the vast majority of attempts by criminals to use our platform for illicit material are stopped.

Before I speak about the steps we have taken to combat unlawful content on our platform, let me first tell you more about MindGeek and how we operate. MindGeek's flagship video-sharing platform is Pornhub. Created in 2007, Pornhub is a leading free, ad-supported, adult content hosting and streaming website, offering visitors the ability to view content uploaded by verified users, individual content creators and third party studios. Demand for MindGeek's content rivals that of some of the largest social media platforms. For example, in 2020, Pornhub averaged over 4 million unique user sessions per day in Canada alone. In 2020, over 30% of our Canadian visitors were women. Roughly 1.3 million Canadian women visit the site every day.

Running one of the world's most visited websites is a responsibility we do not take lightly. The spread of non-consensual and CSAM content is a massive challenge facing all social media platforms. The U.S.-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, also known as NCMEC, the industry standard for reporting CSAM, says it has received 16.9 million referrals from tech companies about possible child abuse, with well over 90% of those related to a single social media platform. MindGeek is a proud partner of NCMEC. We report every instance of CSAM when we are aware of it, so that this information can be disseminated to and investigated by authorities across the globe.

We share the objectives reflected in the 11 voluntary principles developed by governments, including Canada, to fight online sexual exploitation and abuse. We have been leading this fight by being more vigilant in our moderation than almost any other platform, both within and outside of the adult space.

Today, only professional studios and verified users and creators, whose personal identity and date of birth have been confirmed by MindGeek, may upload content. This means every piece of content on our websites can be traced back to its uploader, whose identity and location are known to us. We are the first and only major social media platform, adult or non-adult, to introduce this policy. We hope and expect that the entire social media industry will follow our lead.

We are also working to ensure that once content is removed, it can never make its way back to our platform or to any platform. The revictimization of individuals when their content is re-uploaded causes profound injury that we are working fiercely to prevent. We are attacking this problem in two ways. First, our people are trained to remove such material upon request. Second, we digitally fingerprint any content removed from our website so that it cannot be re-uploaded to our own platform.

For the last two years, we have been building a tool called “SafeGuard” to help fight the distribution of non-consensual intimate images. As I sit before you today, I am pleased to report that this month we will be implementing SafeGuard for all videos uploaded to Pornhub. We will offer SafeGuard for free to our non-adult peers, including Facebook, YouTube and Reddit. We are optimistic that all major social media platforms will implement SafeGuard and contribute to its fingerprint database. Such co-operation will be a major step to limit the spread of non-consensual material on the Internet.

Mr. Chair, thank you for the opportunity to discuss MindGeek's commitment to trust and safety, including our work to stamp out CSAM and non-consensual material on our platforms and on the Internet as a whole.

We look forward to answering the committee's questions.

Thank you.

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