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Pornhub hit with lawsuit over videos victimizing 12-year-old who was drugged and raped

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10 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

There is a backlog of about five months between when a user reports a video and an authorized team leader reviews it to determine whether to remove it, allowing the video to remain available on the Pornhub site for download and redistribution for nearly a half year after the complaint was first reviewed.

A man who as a 12-year-old boy was drugged and raped in nearly two dozen videos that were uploaded to Pornhub by his victimizer for monetary gain is suing the massive online pornography leviathan for breaking child sex trafficking and RICO laws.

According to the world’s leading anti-porn activist Laila Mickelwait, “His jury trial could put Pornhub out of business.”

In recent years, scandal-plagued Pornhub — and its shadowy parent company, Mindgeek, which recently changed its name to “Aylo” to escape its “scandal-ridden smut empire” reputation — has come under fire for posting child sexual exploitation material, sexual trafficking, and assault videos and then ignoring victim’s pleas to remove the videos from their website.

The predator who admitted that in the summer of 2018 he used, induced, and enticed the young boy and another minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing video pornography is now behind bars serving a 40-year sentence for “sexual exploitation of a child, advertising child pornography, and distribution of child pornography.”

However, Mindgeek and Pornhub have yet to face their young accuser for enabling the public distribution of the videos.

According to the lawsuit, videos of the boy’s molestation “astonishingly” generated nearly 200,000 video views, and as a result of Mindgeek’s actions and/or inactions, the now-young man “has suffered incomprehensible past and present physical, emotional, and mental trauma.”

“MindGeek knows that there is a demand for CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) on their sites and they cater to this demand,” according to the 78-page legal complaint filed in a U.S. District Court in Alabama where the sexual exploitation of the minors took place.

Hundreds of thousands of ‘teen’ sex video titles available

The case asserts that Mindgeek has historically sought to maximize profit, aggressively promoting child porn via titles and video descriptions that would more easily direct Google users to the exploitative videos featured on Pornhub.

“One such tag MindGeek used to classify pornographic content on its websites was ‘Teen.’ The suggested terms include ‘abused teen,’ ‘crying teen,’ ‘extra small petite teen,’ and ‘Middle School Girls,’” the legal complaint explains.

“In 2018, the word ‘teen’ was the seventh most searched term on all of Pornhub,” the complaint notes. “Other eponymous search terms, including ‘rape,’ ‘preteen,’ ‘pedophilia,’ ‘underage rape,’ and ‘extra small teens’ would call up videos depicting the same.”

The proliferation of these keywords and tags on the website ensures that when outside users Google these terms, Pornhub, or another MindGeek website, will be among the top results. This draws new users, even those searching the internet for illegal content, to MindGeek websites.

MindGeek’s aggressive data collection and traffic analytics mean that MindGeek knows exactly what users are looking for (and what exists) on their sites and that this includes sex trafficking material and CSAM.

For example, as The New York Times recently reported, as of December 4, 2020, a search for “girl under18” led to more than 100,000 videos. And a search for “14yo” led to more than 100,000 videos and “13yo” led to approximately 155,000 videos.  MindGeek sought to capitalize on such traffic by allowing illegal search terms, creating suggested search terms, keywords, and tags

Purposefully failing to censor criminal child/teen porn videos

The case notes that while Mindgeek-Pornhub does have online moderators who review complaints about videos on the site, the 10 moderators “have no prior training, medical or otherwise, to identify whether someone depicted in a pornographic video is a child” and are, by design, set up to fail at their task.

The ten individuals on the “moderation/formatting team” were each tasked by MindGeek to review approximately 800-900 pornographic videos per 8-hour shift, or about 100 videos per hour. According to Pornhub, there are approximately 18,000 videos uploaded daily, with an average length of approximately 11 minutes per video. Hence, each moderator is tasked with reviewing approximately 1,100 minutes of video each hour. This is an impossible task, and MindGeek knows that.

To compensate for and accomplish the impossible task, moderators/formatters fast-forward and skip through videos, often with the sound turned down. The problem is not resources: MindGeek’s annual revenues are at least $500 million, and it could certainly hire and train more true moderators.

One of the most disturbing assertions in the case is that “When minor victims of sex trafficking and their representatives have contacted MindGeek to remove videos of them from its websites, MindGeek has refused to do so.”

In some cases, MindGeek moderators/formatters even looked at video comments, deleted those noting a video constituted child pornography or otherwise should be removed from the system, and left the video up.

The MindGeek moderators/formatters are discouraged from removing illegal content for particularly profitable users. Generally, when an uploader has a history of highly viewed content, the employees are only permitted to send warning letters about illegal or inappropriate content.

There is a backlog of about five months between when a user reports a video and an authorized team leader reviews it to determine whether to remove it, allowing the video to remain available on the Pornhub site for download and redistribution for nearly a half year after the complaint was first reviewed.

The videos that the boy’s victimizer uploaded to Pornhub bore “disturbing titles that clearly suggested the child depicted was a minor, including but not limited to: ‘(Had sex with) my Step Nephew’; ‘Taking Teen Virginity’; ‘My sweet little nephew.’ The other 20 video titles are too crude and obscene for LifeSiteNews to cite.

Despite those titles and the content of the videos, Mindgeek “never informed the authorities about the identity of the child sexual predator, the fact he posed child sexual violence, or the fact that child sexual violence was being utilized on their platforms for profit to their mutual benefit.”

At no time did the MindGeek Defendants attempt to verify CV1’s identity or age, inquire about their status as minor children, victims of sex trafficking, or otherwise use their platform to root out the trafficking of their images. Instead, the MindGeek Defendants continued to disseminate these images around the world for profit even after law enforcement informed the MindGeek Defendants the images contained child pornography.

‘Pornhub would rather stop doing business than prevent kids from watching porn’ 

Pornhub has now ceased operations in 12 states that have begun to require age verification in order to enter the porn sites: Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Mississippi, Kentucky, Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, and Nebraska.

“The world’s biggest porn site would rather stop doing business than prevent kids from watching,” conservative commentator and author Michael Knowles noted earlier this year. “Quite telling!”

“Pornhub has decided that age verification laws damage their business model to such an extent that it is better for them to simply block entire states rather than comply with (age verification laws),” LifeSiteNews columnist Jonathon Van Maren wrote in January.

Despite the legal troubles, Pornhub racked up a total of 5.49 billion visits globally in May, and with over 1.1 billion visits in the U.S. was ranked 10th nationally for online traffic. It’s not unusual for the website to reach over 10 billion total global monthly visits.

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Business

It Took Trump To Get Canada Serious About Free Trade With Itself

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From the  Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Trump’s protectionism has jolted Canada into finally beginning to tear down interprovincial trade barriers

The threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and the potential collapse of North American free trade have prompted Canada to look inward. With international trade under pressure, the country is—at last—taking meaningful steps to improve trade within its borders.

Canada’s Constitution gives provinces control over many key economic levers. While Ottawa manages international trade, the provinces regulate licensing, certification and procurement rules. These fragmented regulations have long acted as internal trade barriers, forcing companies and professionals to navigate duplicate approval processes when operating across provincial lines.

These restrictions increase costs, delay projects and limit job opportunities for businesses and workers. For consumers, they mean higher prices and fewer choices. Economists estimate that these barriers hold back up to $200 billion of Canada’s economy annually, roughly eight per cent of the country’s GDP.

Ironically, it wasn’t until after Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that it began to address domestic trade restrictions. In 1994, the first ministers signed the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), committing to equal treatment of bidders on provincial and municipal contracts. Subsequent regional agreements, such as Alberta and British Columbia’s Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement in 2007, and the New West Partnership that followed, expanded cooperation to include broader credential recognition and enforceable dispute resolution.

In 2017, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) replaced the AIT to streamline trade among provinces and territories. While more ambitious in scope, the CFTA’s effectiveness has been limited by a patchwork of exemptions and slow implementation.

Now, however, Trump’s protectionism has reignited momentum to fix the problem. In recent months, provincial and territorial labour market ministers met with their federal counterpart to strengthen the CFTA. Their goal: to remove longstanding barriers and unlock the full potential of Canada’s internal market.

According to a March 5 CFTA press release, five governments have agreed to eliminate 40 exemptions they previously claimed for themselves. A June 1 deadline has been set to produce an action plan for nationwide mutual recognition of professional credentials. Ministers are also working on the mutual recognition of consumer goods, excluding food, so that if a product is approved for sale in one province, it can be sold anywhere in Canada without added red tape.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has signalled that his province won’t wait for consensus. Ontario is dropping all its CFTA exemptions, allowing medical professionals to begin practising while awaiting registration with provincial regulators.

Ontario has partnered with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to implement mutual recognition of goods, services and registered workers. These provinces have also enabled direct-to-consumer alcohol sales, letting individuals purchase alcohol directly from producers for personal consumption.

A joint CFTA statement says other provinces intend to follow suit, except Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

These developments are long overdue. Confederation happened more than 150 years ago, and prohibition ended more than a century ago, yet Canadians still face barriers when trying to buy a bottle of wine from another province or find work across a provincial line.

Perhaps now, Canada will finally become the economic union it was always meant to be. Few would thank Donald Trump, but without his tariffs, this renewed urgency to break down internal trade barriers might never have emerged.

Lee Harding is a research fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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2025 Federal Election

Carney’s budget is worse than Trudeau’s

Published on

By Gage Haubrich

Liberal Leader Mark Carney is planning to borrow more money than former prime minister Justin Trudeau.

That’s an odd plan for a former banker because the federal government is already spending more on debt interest payments than it spends on health-care transfers to the provinces.

Let’s take a deeper look at Carney’s plan.

Carney says that his government would “spend less, invest more.”

At first glance, that might sound better than the previous decade of massive deficits and increasing debt, but does that sound like a real change?

Because if you open a thesaurus, you’ll find that “spend” and “invest” are synonyms, they mean the same thing.

And Carney’s platform shows it. Carney plans to increase government spending by $130 billion. He plans to increase the federal debt by $225 billion over the next four years. That’s about $100 billion more than Trudeau was planning borrow over the same period, according to the most recent Fall Economic Statement.

Carney is planning to waste $5.6 billion more on debt interest charges than Trudeau. Interest charges already cost taxpayers more than $1 billion per week.

The platform claims that Carney will run a budget surplus in 2028, but that’s nonsense. Because once you include the $48 billion of spending in Carney’s “capital” budget, the tiny surplus disappears, and taxpayers are stuck with more debt.

And that’s despite planning to take even more money from Canadians in years ahead. Carney’s platform shows that his carbon tariff, another carbon tax on Canadians, will cost taxpayers $500 million.

The bottom line is that government spending, no matter what pile it is put into, is just government spending. And when the government spends too much, that means it must borrow more money, and taxpayers have to pay the interest payments on that irresponsible borrowing.

Canadians don’t even believe that Carney can follow through on his watered-down plan. A majority of Canadians are skeptical that Carney will balance the operational budget in three years, according to Leger polling.

All Carney’s plan means for Canadians is more borrowing and higher debt. And taxpayers can’t afford anymore debt.

When the Liberals were first elected the debt was $616 billion. It’s projected to reach almost $1.3 trillion by the end of the year, that means the debt has more than doubled in the last decade.

Every single Canadian’s individual share of the federal debt averages about $30,000.

Interest charges on the debt are costing taxpayers $53.7 billion this year. That’s more than the government takes in GST from Canadians. That means every time you go to the grocery store, fill up your car with gas, or buy almost anything else, all that federal sales tax you pay isn’t being used for anything but paying for the government’s poor financial decisions.

Creative accounting is not the solution to get the government’s fiscal house in order. It’s spending cuts. And Carney even says this.

“The federal government has been spending too much,” said Carney. He then went on to acknowledge the huge spending growth of the government over the last decade and the ballooning of the federal bureaucracy. A serious plan to balance the budget and pay down debt includes cutting spending and slashing bureaucracy.

But the Conservatives aren’t off the hook here either. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said that he will balance the budget “as soon as possible,” but hasn’t told taxpayers when that is.

More debt today means higher taxes tomorrow. That’s because every dollar borrowed by the federal government must be paid back plus interest. Any party that says it wants to make life more affordable also needs a plan to start paying back the debt.

Taxpayers need a government that will commit to balancing the budget for real and start paying back debt, not one that is continuing to pile on debt and waste billions on interest charges.

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