MONTREAL — Much like “Hootsuite,” “Nvidia,” “Etsy” and countless others, the term “Aylo” is tech-sounding to the point of cliché. In this sense, it’s more or less the same as “MindGeek,” the company name it recently replaced: vaguely aspirational-sounding and totally meaningless. Neither suggests the company in question controls some of the biggest pornographic titles in the world. The only difference: “Aylo” has the benefit of novelty, while “MindGeek” is one of the most toxic names in tech.

This goes a long way in explaining why Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), the British Virgin Islands-based private equity firm with an Ottawa office, went about changing MindGeek’s name. When ECP acquired MindGeek in March, the Montreal-founded, Luxembourg-based company was the subject of myriad lawsuits, including several proposed class actions, involving allegations of human trafficking, sex trafficking and non-consensual content. Pornhub, wrote New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in December 2020, “is infested with rape videos.”

In August 2022, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney went further, describing MindGeek as a “known alleged criminal entity” that intentionally throttled content moderation because illegal content was good for business. For investors, MindGeek’s upside was its consistently rosy financials. Despite all the ghastly headlines, the company made nearly US$200 million in 2020, according to a pitch deck I saw in 2021. Its “Aylo” re-christening caps ECP’s five-month reputational laundering of the MindGeek brand, during which company principals showed contrition, pledged change and otherwise emphasized the firm’s commitment to “ethics-first investing.” 

Yet typing a few noxious search terms into Pornhub, the flagship of Aylo’s sprawling adult-only empire, shows the site still promotes role-playing material depicting incestuous relationships and non-consensual filming. As well, advertisers can still build keyword-based advertising campaigns on Aylo’s advertising platform TrafficJunky, using terms that imply illegal activity. 

Incest is a criminal offence, and its depiction is prohibited by Pornhub’s own terms of service. Yet role-playing portrayals of it are easy to find on the site. And while the publication of non-consensual intimate recording is also a criminal offence, videos with titles like “Stop recording me” are but a few search words away on Pornhub. 

In June, I sent a couple examples of videos depicting non-consensual filming on Pornhub’s site to ECP partner Solomon Friedman. The result? Frankly bizarre. “We appreciate you bringing these videos to our attention for further study and review,” he responded, but added the videos in question “are confirmed to not depict illegal content or to otherwise violate our Terms of Service. … We are continuing to review the content on the basis of your concerns, including the use of titles and metatags.” Two of the videos whose titles imply non-consensual recording were taken down pending review shortly thereafter. Both have since been deleted altogether … for what an on-screen notice calls “a violation of the Terms and Conditions.”

In a follow-up email, Friedman noted Aylo’s membership in the Take It Down Initiative, a service from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children that helps individuals remove sexually explicit photos taken of them under the age of 18. Aylo is also a member of StopNCII, which helps remove non-consensual intimate images from the internet. It should be noted, too, that searching terms on Pornhub that suggest illegal activity doesn’t always yield material with titles or content suggesting illegal activity.

But Pornhub’s own recommended search terms, which the site automatically generates based on previous similar searches, in some cases contravene Pornhub’s terms of service, which prohibit depictions of incest. I sent a typically appalling example of this to Friedman. “Any potentially violative tag that is generated automatically through search results needs to comply with our banned words that we continuously update. I will forward that one for review to be updated, as well,” he said.

In any event, it certainly says something that a company aiming to make investing in the pornography industry “boring” and “institutional,” and which trumpets “child protection, intimate image security and digital self-determination” as its core values, can’t seem to prevent the proliferation on its own platform of material with titling that suggests illegal activity. I’m not talking here about legitimate kink. To my eyes, anyway, the examples I found had titles suggesting blood relatives having sex. 

Friedman begged to differ. The titles in question, he noted, didn’t contain possessive or relational modifiers (“Granny” as opposed to “my granny,” say), and therefore passed Aylo’s muster. “Simply put, it is compliant,” he said of the material I sent him. 

I got quite a different reaction when I sent the same examples to the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P). “Without getting into the much broader issues surrounding misogyny, violence and the extreme nature of videos hosted on Pornhub, it is completely obscene that ‘incest’-themed content is seemingly widely available on the website,” said Stephen Sauer, director of the C3P’s tipline Cybertip.ca, where people in Canada can report online child sexual exploitation.

The problem isn’t just on Pornhub. Over at TrafficJunky, where would-be advertisers can purchase space on Aylo-owned sites, it is still possible to build campaigns targeting terms like “daddy and daughter” and “do not film me”—even though the company once known as MindGeek has been aware of the issue of problematic search terms on TrafficJunky for over a year. (“There is nothing remotely unlawful about either the pieces of content or the available TrafficJunky keywords you identified,” Friedman said in an email.)

All of this is a reminder that, despite the new name, today’s Aylo is in many key ways similar to the MindGeek of yore. The firm boasts about its “extensive team of human moderators,” yet Friedman wouldn’t say how many have been hired since the firm acquired MindGeek. Even the new name isn’t new. Founded in 2010, Aylo was a MindGeek subsidiary long before it became the company brand, and counted MindGeek employees as administrators—including Andreas Alkiviades Andreou, who has served as a director of Luxembourg-based MindGeek’s parent company since 2016. 

Finally, ECP refuses to divulge the identity of its investors, much as MindGeek’s executives didn’t disclose the existence of its majority owner, Bernrd Bergmair, until the Financial Times rooted him out of obscurity in 2020.

About three years ago, I wrote about the many pieces of objectionable content I was able to find on Pornhub—content that was in clear violation of the site’s terms of service. A lot has happened since: a scathing New York Times column, the loss of Visa’s and Mastercard’s payment services, lawsuits and an ownership change. Yet so much remains the same, up to and including the ability to post and monetize troubling content on the biggest porn sites on the planet. It might call itself Aylo, but MindGeek lives on. 

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”