A new tile falls on MindGeek, pornography giant headed from Montreal. In a shocking report on the excesses of the porn industry, the French Senate estimates that the audience of the Pornhub site is made up of 17% minors, expressing alarm that children, some of whom as early as primary school, are exposed to increasingly “trash” and extreme content.
Owned by MindGeek, Pornhub is without context the porn site that generates the most traffic in France, a country that ranks fourth in the world in terms of consumers after the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. Each month, 9.2 million unique visitors visit the site in France.
However, according to a Senate report entitled “Porn: the hell of the decor”, published on Wednesday, 1.6 million visitors to Pornhub are minors, or 17% of the total audience. This share exceeds that of its main competitors: xHamster (7.6%), xVideos (11.8%), Tukif (13.4%) and Xnxx (3.5%). The share of underage visitors on Youporn and RedTube — platforms owned by MindGeek — is lower. It stands at 7% and 5.7% respectively.
The Senate delegation is alarmed that “porn, including the most ‘trash’ and extreme porn, [soit] accessible for free in just a few clicks. Two-thirds of children under 15 and one-third of those under 12 have already been exposed to pornographic images, voluntarily or involuntarily. “Each month, almost a third of boys under 15 go to a porn site,” he said.
The report of the French Senate details the pornographic consumption of minors which, today, is no longer done by buying “discreetly in specialized shops” VHS cassettes and magazines with content qualified as “soft”. Result: the consumption of pornographic content “has become massive” among adults, but also very present “among adolescents and even children”. This, in total violation of the Penal Code which, in fact, punishes any distribution of pornographic content likely to be seen or perceived by a minor.
It is reported that the porn industry “has become massive and structured around a few key economic players”, such as MindGeek, who are not traditional players in the industry, but rather “specialists in the circulation of silver “.
For these companies, we read, the stakes of profitability take precedence over human considerations: “This commodification of women’s sex and bodies on a global scale has generated a system of violence against women, violence that is now erected sexual norm by this industry that is blind to the content it broadcasts and the suffering it causes, an industry focused solely on the search for economic profits. »
On this subject, the senators report the remarks made during hearings this spring Grégory Dorcel, CEO of the French group Dorcel, a major producer and distributor of pornographic content in France: “For seven to eight years, wild sites, especially the tubing, disseminate pornographic content without any restriction of access, for purely commercial reasons, and in defiance of all the consequences this may have on children. »
“Not only do they broadcast pornographic content to anyone – including children – but they also broadcast anything: extreme, demeaning images,” he said, arguing that these sites “hosted at the abroad, in tax havens” achieved nearly 2 billion dollars in turnover on a global X market of around 8 billion.
The Dorcel group believed that these platforms “have brought unlimited access to pornographic content […], a weakening of producers or even economic dependence, editorial disempowerment and complete deregulation on the web, opposed to the regulation that historically reigns over TV networks. »