LOS ANGELES—Attorneys representing Aylo in a federal district court on Friday asked a judge to dismiss a batch of sex trafficking lawsuits brought by women who allege they were minors when they were victimized by the illicit sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on platforms owned by the Montreal-based company.
U.S. District Judge Wesley Hsu was not fully convinced by the arguments presented by the Aylo attorneys, as the plaintiffs claimed that the company’s employees were involved in optimizing the questionable material. That material includes sexual abuse imagery posted by former intimate partners.
Arameh Zargham O’Boyle, an attorney representing Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek and referred to as such in many of these lawsuits, argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects platform operators from liability for content published by third-party users, including the intimate partners who posted the CSAM.
“Section 230 immunizes a website from liability only if the content at issue originally was ‘information provided by another information content provider,'” reads the filing discussed during the hearing Friday. This pertains specifically to the case of Serena Fleites v. MindGeek et al. Fleites was the subject of the controversial New York Times investigative column by Nicholas Kristof, “The Children of Pornhub,” which has been criticized for being too one-sided by journalists and activists.
Judge Hsu also weighed heavily arguments made by the plaintiffs that Aylo and its affiliated properties generated revenues and profits from the marketing of such videos. Hsu intimates that they don’t operate as “neutral” platforms when it comes to content moderation and removal.
Hsu explained, via Courthouse News Service coverage, “I don’t know that I can ignore that. … Shouldn’t they at least have some discovery to find out if they’re wrong?”
Judge Hsu is presiding over similar proceedings involving a class action lawsuit claiming to represent thousands of women who were victimized by sexual abuse imagery found on Aylo platforms. Another judge who previously presided over the same class action in 2023 ended up denying Aylo’s claims to dismiss the case on similar grounds.
The lawsuits representing individual plaintiffs currently before Hsu have opted out of class action formats to pursue specific claims for monetary damages.
It is worth noting that all of this litigation covers periods when Aylo, at the time MindGeek, operated under its former ownership group, which ended in 2023. In the time since, the private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners was formed and bought up the company and rebranded it as Aylo.
Aylo and federal prosecutors reached a deferred prosecution agreement requiring that the company hire a third-party independent auditor to monitor the trust and safety programming of the company for three years and to pay out and settle with all survivors who were victimized across its free platforms.
