In the midst of the storm due to the influence of porn on the youngest and the impact it has on their sexuality, after the latest cases of gang rapes in which both the aggressors and the victims were minors, the company that owns the streaming platform of pornographic videos Pornhub -MindGeek- has been acquired by Ethical Capital Partners (ECP). It is a new private equity firm based in Ottawa (Canada). The terms of the agreement and the amounts of said operation have not been disclosed. Also this week, a report by the Young Women’s Federation said that in 22% of Tinder dates that involved sex, the women had been raped.
ECP was created last year and says it focuses on technology businesses with “legal and regulatory complexity and that value transparency and accountability.” It is led by Rocco Meliambro, a cannabis entrepreneur, and Fady Mansour, a criminal lawyer, who is listed as managing partner. Derek Ogden, retired Chief Superintendent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, is also a partner at the firm.
“The adult entertainment industry will always be the subject of significant legal and regulatory scrutiny,” Ogden says in the statement. “Our pre-closing reviews revealed that MindGeek operates in a legal and responsible manner,” he added.
Along the same lines, Fady Mansour, another of ECP’s founders, said that “at ECP, we look for innovative and ethical companies that operate on the frontier of new and evolving industries. At MindGeek, we have identified a dynamic technology brand that is based in confidence and security. “ECP seeks investment opportunities in industries that require principled, ethical leadership. For his part, Rocco Meliambro acknowledges in the same statement that “the adult entertainment industry is being influenced by the evolution of public opinion and regulatory approaches, and the time is right to make this business evolve.”
It must be remembered that MindGeek was already involved in a controversy three years ago due to accusations that videos of underage women appeared on its different platforms -YouPorn, Redtube, Brazzers, Men.com, Sean Cody, Trans Angels and Nutaku. , which caused -for example- Visa and Mastercard to break their relationship with them, and the Parliament of Canada to initiate an investigation, in response to which, the Government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau presented a proposal to take action against harmful content online, although the initiatives were criticized as too draconian. Although MindGeek’s headquarters are in Luxembourg, most of the offices are in Montreal. At the same time the company announced that it was looking for a buyer. In this sense, ECP has already said that none of the former owners of MindGeek will remain with the company.
Since then, Porhub and the entire industry have announced measures to ensure that the core values ??of these platforms are “consent, freedom of sexual expression, authenticity, originality and diversity.” In addition, they ensure that given the evidence that there are many minors who enter these types of Internet sites, despite the fact that they call themselves an adult entertainment industry, they have introduced controls so that only verified users can upload content and that there is a large team of human moderators who manually check each video that is uploaded.
It is hard to believe that this is possible if, as explained by ECP, Pornhub is visited by 130 million adults every day and has 76 million monthly active users. In February of this year, Pornhub was the twelfth most visited website in the world, preceded by Xvideos, another porn video platform, according to the Similarweb portal. In Spain, it occupies the 16th position in the ranking of websites that accumulated the most visits in February 2023.
The controversy with pornography on the net has always pivoted on two axes. On the one hand, the type of content and, specifically, the type of sexual practices shown in the videos and the consent and age of the participants in them. On the other, the efforts made by all these platforms to prevent minors from visiting the porn video pages.
Regarding the first of these axes, the companies behind Pornhub and others have always said -as ECP does now- that they make every effort to ensure that there are no videos with minors on their sites and that women and The men who appear in them have given their consent both to appear in the images and to carry out the sexual practices shown in them.
Until three years ago, it was enough to search for words like ‘rape’ or ‘very young girl’ for porn video streaming sites to return a significantly long list of results. Currently, if the same search is done, the answer is that there are no results to show and, in some cases, a warning message about the responsible use of these types of sites and the content that is seen.
But the fact that it is more difficult to access does not necessarily mean that this type of content does not exist. It’s just harder to find them. It must be remembered that the video of the Pamplona herd, filmed by the attackers themselves, ended up on these pages, where in fact it became one of the most viewed. In its day, a report from The New York Times discovered that although most of the rape videos were not real, there were a large number of recordings in which what had been filmed and uploaded was a real rape.
In addition, there is an abundance of extreme BDSM sexual practices or scenes in which a woman has sex with a fairly large group of men, which -according to experts- offers a model of sexuality based on violence, abuse and humiliation of the woman. women. Here, the platforms use in their defense that they are protected by a kind of freedom of sexual expression. The problem is that despite all their efforts, these contents are seen by younger and younger children and adolescents.
The age of first access to free pornographic content in Spain has dropped to 8 years, while from the age of 14 the consumption of this new pornography, “especially vexatious to women and very macho”, is already widespread, according to the study ‘New pornography and changes in interpersonal relationships’, prepared by the Youth Network and Social Inclusion and the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB). And to date trying to limit the access of the youngest has been like trying to put doors on the field.
So far, only the UK and France have seriously attempted to establish a system to limit minors’ access to online porn. The UK tried in 2019 and failed. The problem is that it is not enough to ask for the age of the user who tries to enter, as online shops that sell alcohol are already forced to do. You also have to make sure you are not lying. And this can only be done if the content provider asks for personal data and documents, which conflicts with data protection and privacy. In the event of a data breach, it would be very easy to know who is a user of a porn site, which is not the business of anyone other than the person concerned.
France announced in February of this year the creation of a digital certification application to access porn sites, which should come into operation in September of this year, but the problem remains the same: data privacy.
