MONTREAL — A Canadian government-supported charity has withdrawn from a global anti-child-exploitation network over its association with MindGeek, the tech company behind some of the world’s biggest pornography sites, The Logic has learned.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) has resigned from InHope, a network of hotlines operating in all European Union member states, as well as Russia, South Africa, the U.S., Australia and Thailand, among others. The network is funded by the European Commission and counts Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft among its partners.

C3P, which is funded by the governments of Canada and Manitoba and counts Bell, Telus and Shaw among its donors, had been a member of InHope since 2004, but backed out in April because the organization accepted a €25,000 donation from MindGeek, whose stable of pornography sites include Pornhub, YouPorn and Redtube. “InHope certainly does some important work. However, onboarding with MindGeek was not something we were going to be a part of,” C3P information technology director Lloyd Richardson told The Logic.

In June 2019, MindGeek announced it had partnered with InHope “to further their mission of keeping children out of, and away, from age-restricted media.” At the time, InHope executive director Denton Howard heralded having MindGeek as a “corporate partner,” saying it was “vital in helping InHope achieve its mission of an internet free of child sexual abuse material.”

In a recent interview with The Logic, however, Howard said InHope decided to return MindGeek’s donation following a July vote of its members. “It is unfortunate that the Canadian Centre for Child Protection stepped away from InHope membership before this issue could be voted on by members, but we hope to welcome them back to the InHope network in the future,” Howard said, adding that “there was no commercial partnership” between InHope and MindGeek.

MindGeek CEO Feras Antoon and COO David Tassillo didn’t respond to a list of questions sent by The Logic. MindGeek spokesperson Michael Willis didn’t respond to The Logic’s request for comment.

While the privately held company is based in Luxembourg, it originated in Montreal and maintains a large workforce in the city. 

On Wednesday, 20 senators and members of Parliament, representing four political parties, signed an open letter to Justice Minister David Lametti calling on the government to enforce the criminal code against MindGeek as it applies to sexual offences, including non-consensual publication of intimate images and child pornography. 

“Over the past two years, MindGeek has received international attention due to the real exploitation of women and minors featured in some of the content that they publish and sell on Pornhub and other subsidiary websites. While MindGeek is not the only company that engages in these exploitative practices, it is by far the largest,” the letter reads. 

“Many victims now are speaking out and sharing horrific stories of their videos of child abuse, sexual assault and sex trafficking being posted on Pornhub and available to all for download. For some, their pleas to have the videos removed are ignored by Pornhub for months or years. Even when the videos are removed, in many cases it is only hours or days before their exploitation is uploaded again. This is because MindGeek is not required to verify the age or consent of those portrayed in content that is uploaded to their websites.”

Richardson said C3P takes issue with both the lack of age verification to access MindGeek-owned sites, meaning it is readily accessible to minors, as well as some of the content on the sites. “If you’re going to a MindGeek site, you can find stepdad or incest-themed material, which is quite popular, and the suggestion of barely legal content,” he said. (“Teen” was Pornhub’s 12th most popular search term in 2019, according to the company’s Year in Review report.)

“We have several measures in place to ensure that underage material can not appear, and in fact, these measures have made Pornhub have the fewest cases of child sexual abuse material of any of the user generated platforms, adult or otherwise,” a Pornhub spokesperson told The Logic in October, adding the company has enough moderators “to manually review every single upload.”

MindGeek properties, including Pornhub, prohibit the posting of content depicting incest. Yet The Logic was able to find numerous examples of incest-themed videos on both Pornhub and YouPorn.

Children’s access to pornography is an abiding concern among InHope members, with 17 out of 47 member hotlines highlighting the issue, according to its 2019 annual report. InHope member NetSafe, New Zealand’s independent online-safety organization, said in its own 2019 annual report that exposure to pornography is “a real risk for children online, ranking alongside online bullying and contact with strangers.”

On its corporate website, MindGeek bills itself as a “leader in web design, IT, web development and SEO.” The site doesn’t mention the word “pornography,” but describes the company’s cloud services suite, hosting, content delivery and payment services, among others. “Gathering, storing, processing and analyzing billions of data points a day is a colossal challenge that MindGeek Engineering embraces,” reads the site’s terms of use page.

Pornhub, one of the most popular sites in the world, supports environmental causes, anti-racism initiatives and campaigns against domestic violence. Yet MindGeek has been under scrutiny as of late. 

In September, independent senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, a signatory of the open letter to Lametti, introduced the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, which would make offering sexually explicit material on the internet available to a young person for commercial purposes an offence. The bill had its second reading in the Senate earlier this month.