Media Releases and Opportunities

Thursday, Sep. 19, 2024 (Halifax): With Bill S-210 returning to Canada’s House of Commons in October for third reading and the government’s Online Harms Act receiving first reading in February 2024, there is considerable government interest in regulating online pornography.

But Dal legal scholar Dr. Elaine Craig says the proposed legislation misses the mark in dealing with the central challenge posed by the online porn industry—a business model built on algorithms that drive and shape consumption, often promoting imagery that depicts sexual assault or frames content as sexual violence.

In her new book, Mainstreaming Porn: Sexual Integrity and the Law Online, to be launched at 7pm on September 24 at Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law, Dr. Craig explores how mainstream porn adopted the strategies of social media, how their algorithms are in turn shaping our culture, and what Canadian law can do about it. 

"The business model for porn has changed," says Dr. Craig, a professor at the Schulich School of Law. "It’s now consumed on streaming platforms akin to YouTube or Vimeo, driven by algorithms that not only shape the content we see but also amplify its most harmful elements."

Canadians are significant consumers of online pornography. In 2021, major global player Pornhub reported over four million user sessions per day in Canada—that is about 10 per cent of Canadians visiting its site daily. While its website is freely accessible in Canada, the company, which is headquartered in Montreal, is the target of greater regulatory action in the European Union. 

With large volumes of Canadian traffic flowing to Pornhub and other online purveyors, Dr. Craig says it is time to shine a bright light on how the industry’s online practices have adopted the methods of social media to engross users—learning from their visitors’ browsing behaviour and serving up content that caters to and potentially distorts their porn consumption patterns.

“Mainstream porn platforms are data-focused and driven by algorithms. This risks, in the context of porn, an increasingly homogenized representation of sex, bodies and sexualities. While in theory the internet offers a cornucopia of diversity, the reality in an algorithm-driven mainstream porn context may be a representation of the same bodies and sex acts underpinned by the same sexist, racist, heterosexist, and transphobic biases over and over again.”

While Dr. Craig says current proposed legislation could have an impact on reducing the non-consensual distribution of intimate images and the amount of child sexual abuse material (child pornography) online, she says much more needs to be done to hold companies responsible for the content they disseminate. 

She says there are critical steps for Canada’s law makers to consider. Chief among them, she proposes that every province implement a civil statute similar to British Columbia’s, ensuring victims have swift, straightforward access to takedown and de-indexing orders for content that features them without their consent – especially if the federal Online Harms Act is not passed.

But Dr. Craig says more needs to be done to ensure mainstream purveyors of online pornography are legally responsible, under human rights law, civil law and even criminal laws for the sexually explicit material they curate, collate, and promote on their platforms.  

“If the content readily available on major mainstream porn platforms consistently reflected the guidelines articulated in their own policies, much of the porn addressed in my research would be removed, which would be a significant improvement.”

Read a Q&A with Dr. Elaine Craig via Dal News

To arrange an interview and/or receive the first chapter of Mainstreaming Porn: Sexual Integrity and the Law Online, contact:

Andrew Riley 
Senior Manager, Research and Innovation Communications
Dalhousie University
902.456.7904 
andrew.riley@dal.ca