The owner of the world’s largest online pornography empire has agreed to pay US$120 million to victims of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and to put in safeguards to prevent the trafficking of abuse content on the web. A settlement motion was filed in court last week, putting an end to a pair of class-action lawsuits filed in California and Alabama against MindGeek, the company that owns Pornhub and several other porn sites. The company, which has its headquarters in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, rebranded as Aylo in 2023. The lawsuits were filed in 2021 by victims in each U.S. state who claimed that sexually explicit videos of them when they were minors were uploaded to Pornhub without their consent and viewed thousands of times. They alleged that the site’s owner “knowingly” profited from the material and made it widely available to the public on the site as well as others, such as Youporn and Redtube. Aylo has denied the allegations. In the California case, the plaintiff alleged that her abusive boyfriend recorded her during a sexual encounter without her knowledge. “Their relationship ended when he pushed her out of a moving car,” and, years later, she learned that he had uploaded sexually explicit videos of her “as revenge porn” to the defendants’ website that users could “freely view, download, and reupload,” according to the settlement motion. In the Alabama case, the plaintiff alleges she was a minor when she was drugged and then raped by her abuser, who uploaded videos of the abuse to Pornhub. In each case, the plaintiffs alleged that MindGeek reviewed the videos of their CSAM before distributing them for public consumption. Age-verification measures part of settlement As part of the settlement, Pornhub’s parent company has also agreed to take measures to reduce child sexual abuse content from being posted on their platforms, including verifying using government-issued identification that every person who uploads and/or is depicted in content on their sites was 18 or older when the content was made. Other measures include, using content moderation technology to detect and remove CSAM, conduct mandatory CSAM prevention training for all trust and safety employees, and banning users who upload suspected or actual CSAM or content that can’t be verified, among others. A monitoring committee will also meet annually for five years to ensure compliance with the injunctive relief measures, and the company will undergo external auditing for five years as part of the deal. The motion stated that the defendant agrees to the settlement amount and consents to the motion being granted. It will need the approval of Justice Wesley L. Hsu in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. ‘Thousands of potential CSAM videos’ The $120 million will be paid in seven installments, starting with an initial payment this year of $25 million followed by $15.8 million on the first six anniversaries of June 17, 2026. “The scope of the injunctive relief is particularly significant given that discovery revealed tens of thousands of potential CSAM videos and photos that were viewed on Defendants’ websites millions of times before they were removed,” the court document stated. The settlement also underscored the need for the victims to seek closure after a five-year legal battle and the significance of ensuring they never again have to “relive the unconscionable acts they experienced as children.” “As discussed, the personal risks (including of potentially having their identities exposed at trial) and the inevitable trauma that Plaintiffs would have experienced in a public, adversarial trial cannot be overstated,” the document added. “This settlement obviates those risks and offers Plaintiffs and Class Member survivors the closure and privacy that even a resounding trial victory could not.” The class members include anyone who was under 18 when they appeared in a video or image uploaded to Aylo’s sites between Feb. 19, 2021 and Dec. 6, 2024. The plaintiffs were represented by the U.S. litigation firm Susman Godfrey. Aylo has been the target of several separate lawsuits over the last few years from people alleging the company’s platforms hosted videos of rape and CSAM, including another case in Alabama in which a mother alleged that the company ignored repeated requests to remove a video showing the molestation of her 12-year-old son before it was eventually taken down. Aylo has denied the allegations and said it has adopted a “zero tolerance” policy for CSAM and sexually explicit content shared without consent.
