More than 70 MPs, senators call for criminal investigation of Pornhub’s parent company
Recent evidence alleges Montreal-based MindGeek regularly shared child pornography and sexual assault videos
THE CANADIAN PRESS
Mar. 16, 2021 1:57 p.m.
More than 70 parliamentarians from all parties are calling for a full criminal investigation into Pornhub’s parent company following testimony from survivors.
The demand, spelled out in a letter Monday to RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki, comes two weeks after a similar request by more than 100 victims of exploitive content they say was posted to websites owned by MindGeek.
The lawmakers cite recent evidence by victims and child-protection organizations alleging the Montreal-based company regularly shared child pornography and sexual assault videos as well as content shot or posted without the consent of subjects.
“Even more alarming, we have heard evidence that MindGeek continues to make available material featuring child sexual abuse material and non-consensual acts, as one survivor testified to the ethics committee on Feb. 19, 2021: ‘Thanks to Pornhub, today is day 1,292 that I have been naked on these porn sites,’” the letter states.
MindGeek has denied all accusations of wrongdoing, saying it is a global leader in preventing distribution of exploitive videos and images.
Actually, there appears to be much more child abuse material on Facebook than on PornHub. Nevertheless, MindGeek damns itself with faint praise. How much can you believe someone who makes a living selling porn and child porn?
“MindGeek has zero tolerance for non-consensual content, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and any other content that lacks the consent of all parties depicted,” the company said in an email this month.
“The harrowing stories of the survivors of CSAM and non-consensual imagery shake us to our core.”
In December, several major credit card companies suspended payment services to Pornhub, prompting the world’s largest pornography platform to scrub some 10 million videos posted by unverified users.
At least five lawsuits have been filed against the company in the U.S. and Canada over the past year on behalf of survivors of child abuse, sex trafficking and non-consensual image uploads.
The 53 MPs and 20 senators who signed the letter accuse MindGeek of failing to report cases of child pornography to the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children between 2011 and 2020. The company confirmed in an email it “officially began” reporting to the latter early last year.
The signatories say they were “shocked” to learn from RCMP deputy commissioner Stephen White at the House of Commons ethics committee last month that the agency had “zero outstanding investigations” into the company.
Conservative MP Arnold Viersen, who co-chairs the all-party parliamentary group to end human trafficking, says the hoops survivors have to jump through to get illegal content pulled down are “egregious,” and that existing laws need more rigorous enforcement.
“The law is good, it’s just purely not being enforced,” he said Monday in an interview, adding that he is open to expanding the provisions against sexual exploitation.
In December, the House of Commons ethics committee launched a study on how to protect the privacy and reputations of people who appear on pornography websites following an explosive New York Times opinion piece alleging Pornhub distributed child pornography. A report with recommendations to Parliament is expected later this year.
In a March 1 letter, a group of 104 survivors and 525 NGOs in countries ranging from Austria to Zambia applauded the ethics committee for studying the issue.
The coalition went beyond calling on Ottawa to encourage an RCMP investigation, demanding the government to take “immediate legislative and regulatory action to protect children from this predatory and unethical corporation.”
MindGeek draws 170 million visitors a day, including four million Canadians, and generates $460 million in annual revenue, according to the company. It frequently ranks among the dozen most-visited sites in the world, ahead of Netflix and Zoom.
Though legally headquartered in Luxembourg, the company’s main office sits in a squat glass building along a sunken highway in Montreal.
“We have on our territory probably the biggest platform, the most successful platform, in porn, and laws apply,” Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne, who co-chairs the parliamentary group on human trafficking, said Monday in an interview.
“It’s pretty appalling that we seem to be nowhere in terms of actions by the police against Pornhub.”
MindGeek has pushed back against accusations it allows child sexual abuse material on its sites.
“Over the past year, MindGeek has created and implemented comprehensive measures for verification, moderation, and detection that will ensure Pornhub is the safest platform online. Notably, we have taken the unprecedented step of banning content from unverified uploaders, an industry first among tech and social media platforms,” MindGeek said in an email earlier this month.
The platform works with dozens of non-profit organizations that aim to flag content and stop online child exploitation. It also says it uses extensive measures to shut out such material, including “a vast team” of human moderators to manually review each of the 6.8 million videos uploaded annually and remove illegal material, along with automated detection technologies.
None of this was in place before last year when the heat was turned up on them. Like other platforms, they will do the least that they can get away with to satisfy those with power to do anything about them.
The effects of child sexual abuse are horrifying. Few survivors recover enough to have a healthy life. Most struggle with countless issues all their lives.
Another matter that has not been addressed by this article is the ease with which children can access pornography. Children of any age should never be able to access pornography of any kind. A few years ago a young lady from UOttawa coined the term 'The Culture of Rape'. She was describing life in universities and colleges across Canada and the USA. These days you can add many high schools to that list.
I am convinced that The Culture of Rape has its origins in pornography that is easily accessible to adolescent boys. Adolescent boys' brains re-wire during and after puberty. The introduction of pornography causes that process to go haywire. Hence, girls become objects of lust and no longer people made in the image of God.
There is one more issue that needs to be raised here and that is that sin is progressive. Pornography, whether you like it or not is sin. There are several stories on this blog that reveal the progression from ordinary pornography to younger and younger girls, or boys, and increased violence. In its extreme, you may end up raping babies and murdering child victims.
Pornography and child sex abuse material are major contributors to a cultural suicide that leads us further down the road to Sodom.
Activist swarmed by group of attackers after protesting against use of puberty-blocking drugs on children
13 Mar, 2021 21:34
A Canadian activist who traveled to Montreal to demonstrate against giving puberty blockers to children was attacked by black-clad assailants who allegedly punched him, stole his camera, and broke his arm him with a traffic cone.
The incident occurred on Friday night in downtown Montreal, where Vancouver resident Chris Elston said he was having a “peaceful conversation” with a local man when about seven “thugs” swarmed him. Video footage shows several assailants, including at least one woman, pursuing Elston and another man, hitting them with traffic cones and demanding that they leave the area. At one point, one of the attackers hurls a yellow substance toward the men.
Only 53 seconds long but laden with lots of vulgarity! I hate vulgarity!
Elston said he caught the footage on his smartphone after his sign and bodycam were stolen by the attackers. He said the initial assault included punches to his face and the back of his head. His forearm was broken from blocking blows with the traffic cones, and he suffered a popped vein in his hand and a fat lip.
“If criminals think an assault is going to slow me down, they're dead wrong,” Elston said on Twitter. He added, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but children still can't consent to puberty blockers.”
Elston posted a picture of himself with several sandwich-board signs, including one saying, “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers.” Another said, “Children are never born in the wrong body,” while the third appears to show a definition for “dad,” namely: “a human male who protects his kids from gender ideology.”
Elston has pushed some politically sensitive buttons back in his home city of Vancouver, too. He and a friend, Amy Hamm, paid for a massive billboard ad which read “I love J.K. Rowling” last September. The billboard was condemned by a city official as “hateful expression,” in as much as it expressed support for the allegedly transphobic ‘Harry Potter’ author, and it was covered up after just one day.
Elston has also had physical confrontations while wearing sandwich-board signs at events in Vancouver. He was arrested last October, reportedly for “causing a disturbance.” Elston posted a video of a man allegedly plowing into him, at which point he was grabbed from behind by police and arrested.
On Friday night in Montreal, Elson said he refrained from fighting back, because he feared that he would be arrested for defending himself.
‘Ex-gay’ pastor can’t sue Vimeo for removing church's account,
Appeals Court rules
By Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post Contributor
Monday, March 15, 2021
A federal appellate court has ruled that an ex-gay Southern California pastor and his Christian ministry cannot take legal action against the online video hosting platform Vimeo after his account was removed for promoting “sexual orientation change efforts.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled last week that Pastor James Domen and his Church United cannot sue Vimeo due to the company’s immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which Big Tech companies often use to evade liability for content on their websites.
The Second Circuit agreed with U.S. Magistrate Judge Stewart Aaron’s January 2020 decision that Vimeo deleted the church’s account because it violated the platform’s content policies barring the promotion of “SOCE,” which is often derisively called “conversion therapy.”
“This policy, in turn, fell within the confines of the good-faith content policing immunity that the CDA provides to interactive computer services,” the Second Circuit opinion authored by U.S. Circuit Judge Rosemary S. Pooler states.
Domen, who is now has a wife and kids, alleges he “was a homosexual” for three years. But “because of his desire to pursue his faith in Christianity, he began to identify as a former homosexual.”
In October 2016, his ministry created a Vimeo account to upload various videos promoting the organization, including “videos addressing sexual orientation as it relates to religion.” They allegedly uploaded 89 videos over the following two years.
“At some point, Church United upgraded to a professional account, which requires a monthly fee in exchange for access to more features and bandwidth,” the Second Circuit’s opinion states.
“On November 23, 2018, Vimeo e-mailed Domen, informing him that a moderator had marked the Church United account for review. The e-mail explained, ‘Vimeo does not allow videos that promote [SOCE].’”
Vimeo instructed Church United to remove the videos and warned that if it did not do so within 24 hours, Vimeo might remove the videos or the entire account.
It also instructed Church United to download the videos as soon as possible to ensure that the organization could keep them in the event Vimeo deleted the account.
The pastor says that the videos were part of Church United's effort to challenge a California Assembly bill proposing to expand the state’s ban on SOCE to talk therapy and pastoral counseling.
On Dec. 6, 2018, Vimeo deleted Church United’s account, saying that "Vimeo does not allow videos that harass, incite hatred, or include discriminatory or defamatory speech.”
The pastor’s lawyer, Nada Higuera, told the court during an oral argument in December that Vimeo discriminated against the pastor. She argued that Vimeo’s actions were “not against content, but against James Domen himself, and based on his sexual orientation.”
According to Courthouse News, Pooler pushed back by saying that Vimeo “did target content."
“They said they wouldn’t allow it, and he knew that when he signed up. What did he not understand?” Pooler, a Clinton appointee, argued.
In a 2019 op-ed for The Christian Post, Liz Flaherty, author of Discover Eden: Empowering Christian Women to Walk in Sexual Liberty, wrote that some of the examples of conversion therapy described in some government hearings include such harmful practices as electric shock therapy, exposure to pornography, forced separation from loved ones and extreme public shaming.
“However, the greater health care community, including those with faith-based practices, already considers these methods barbaric and unethical,” she noted. “Blasted by the media, this kind of conversion therapy has become a straw man, erected with the intent of advocating one-sided and biased counseling methods that support an ideology that sexuality is completely fixed.”
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Social media outrage in Ukraine as 8-year-old girl blogger announces relationship with teenage boy — and her mom is fine with it
16 Mar, 2021 15:14
© Instagram / @milamaxanetsA scandal has erupted in Ukraine after it was revealed that an eight-year-old blogger with millions of followers is dating a 13-year-old boy, with the complete blessing of her mother, who controls all her social media accounts.
The young Milana Makhanets has almost seven million followers on Singaporean video-sharing app Likee, a TikTok analog popular with young Russian and Ukrainian kids. Milana also works as a model, often participating in children's fashion shows.
On Instagram, in a now-deleted post, the eight-year-old revealed that she'd entered into a relationship with Pasha Pai, a 13-year-old blogger apparently living in Moscow. As well as her large subscriber base on Likee, she also has 486,000 followers on Instagram.
© Instagram / @milamaxanets
"Pasha and I are now a couple," she wrote.
However, despite only recently gaining mainstream attention, the relationship has apparently been going on for some time. On their 'Instagram Stories,' the two lovebirds have posted photos of themselves kissing – and even sleeping in the same bed.
Another photo published by Pasha shows the two shackled together while Milana brushes her teeth in her underwear.
Once the story hit mainstream news, most of the provocative photos and videos were removed. According to the description on the account, Milana's profile is run by her mother, Darya, and she has taken the brunt of the backlash. Writing on Instagram, Darya explained that she didn't have a problem with it, noting "this is their life, and they will figure it out on their own."
On social media, the mother has taken a lot of criticism, with some calling for Milana to be taken off her, and for her be prosecuted. On Facebook, a well-shared post from a Kievan woman named Gerda Weber took aim at Darya:
"Mila's mom Darya has trouble with her head," Weber wrote. "She sexualizes her own child for money. In addition to the squealing children in the comments, Darya doesn't realize that the lion's share of views come from pedophiles."
Darya doesn't realize that the lion's share of views come from pedophiles.
"The problem of child models and children participating in beauty contests has always been a cancerous tumor in the celebrity-forging industry. Nowadays, children bloggers have been added alongside them," she wrote, noting that it could end in an "overdose at 14 years old" or "serious psychological conditions."
Another post, from a lawyer named Anna Malyar, claimed that Milana's "mother made a seductive woman out of an eight-year-old girl for perverts."
Ukrainian journalist and former politician Igor Mosiychuk also commented on the scandal, noting that it "requires the immediate intervention of the National Police."
"All this promotion on Mila and Pasha's social networks is very, very close to child pornography and is a breeding ground, which, like honey, attracts and stimulates pedophiles to act," he wrote on his Facebook page.
This can't be allowed to continue or there will be millions of such blogs by this time next year. At the very least, the mother needs to be psychologically examined. There are elements of child sex trafficking in this relationship. Where are the boy's parents on this?
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