Pornhub Parent Company’s CEO and COO Resign
MindGeek, the internet company best known for operating Pornhub, said that CEO Feras Antoon and COO David Tassillo have resigned.
In a statement to Variety, a company representative said, “Antoon and Tassillo leave MindGeek’s day-to-day operations after more than a decade in leadership positions with the company. With the company strategically positioned for long-term growth, MindGeek’s executive leadership team will run day-to-day operations on an interim basis, with a search underway for replacements.” The rep added that the leadership transition has been in the works since early 2022. Antoon and Tassillo will remain shareholders in MindGeek.
News of the exit of MindGeek’s two top executives comes shortly after the New Yorker published an 8,000-word investigative piece on the company.
According to the article, Pornhub has hosted sexually explicit nonconsensual videos — including those with children — for years. MindGeek’s policies say videos on its site are vetted to ensure that they don’t feature minors and also to verify that the videos have been shared with the consent of the people who appear in them. However, the New Yorker interviewed several women who discovered videos and pictures of themselves on Pornhub that they did not consent to sharing and who spent months trying to have them removed. Since 2020, according to MindGeek, the company does not post content without first passing through human and automated moderation; in addition, when a user flags a video, it is disabled until a review is conducted, according to the company.
