Quebec Public Health had to apologize on Thursday after a staff member posted a link to a Pornhub foot fetish video in a tweet on COVID-19 case counts.
The original tweet stated in French: Here is the situation in Quebec as of April 13.”
Included in the tweet was a hyperlink that led to a “Femdom feet worship” page on the adult video website Pornhub.
The embarrassing mistake led to a public retraction by Sante Quebec, although by the time the department apologized, the tweet had already been live for half an hour.
“Due to a situation beyond our control, a link with inappropriate content was posted on our Twitter account. We are looking into the causes. We are sorry for any inconvenience,” wrote Sante Quebec.
Pornhub is a Canadian-owned pornography company. The video-streaming website’s owner Mindgeek has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years after it was accused of hosting illegal content such as child pornography and sexual abuse videos.
Company officials have even had to appear before parliamentary committees to testify over the content on their platform.
In February, MPs with the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics heard from witnesses including Serena Fleites who said she had sexually explicit videos of her posted to the website when she was only thirteen years old.
“There was instances of the video having 2.7 million views, despite hundreds of comments of people saying this is obviously child pornography. And yet Pornhub still wouldn’t take it down,” said Fleites.
“Even when I messaged them multiple times, it would take forever. When I did get a response, they would hassle me for all these other details.”
