Following an investigation by the New York Times which laid bare multiple accounts of non-consensual sex and child abuse content being exposed on Pornhub, payments giant Mastercard has terminated processing payments for the adult website.
“Title the Children of Pornhub’ – The New York Times laid harrowing accounts of sexual abuse of minors, who were filmed and uploaded onto the Pornhub website, without any verification of content or uploader.
The NYT investigation has caused immediate outrage, with US senators demanding that the Department of Justice launch an instant investigation of MindGeek, the operating company of PornHub.
The revelations of child abuse have led to a payment blackout of Pornhub services by payment providers PayPal and Visa, whilst Mastercard would soon to folloe issuing the statement –
“Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site. We instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance.”
Following the decision, the site has strengthened its upload procedure insisting users are verified before the content is uploaded, as well as removing the option to download videos.
The adult website responded to the decision, by offering the following statement: “These actions are exceptionally disappointing, as they come just two days after Pornhub instituted the most far-reaching safeguards in user-generated platform history.
“Unverified users are now banned from uploading content – a policy no other platform has put in place, including Facebook, which reported 84 million instances of child sexual abuse material over the last three years. In comparison, the Internet Watch Foundation reported 118 incidents on Pornhub over the last three years.”
“This news is crushing for the hundreds of thousands of models who rely on our platform for their livelihoods.”
The majority of the site’s offering is free to users, however, a premium service is available for users behind a monthly paywall.
