Pornhub has been banned from accepting payments over the Visa and Mastercard networks – a major blow to a website that has come under increasing fire for not filtering malicious content effectively.
"It's not about pornography, it's rape," New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote last week in a column that inspired the moves of credit card companies. "Encouraging attacks on children or on someone without their consent is incomprehensible."
Like other social media sites, Pornhub allowed anyone to upload content to share with others. Many of these videos show adults engaging in consensual sexual acts. However, Kristof said that a number of videos show sexual acts involving children under the age of 18. He also found videos of raped women, creepy videos with hidden cameras, and "recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls".
While Pornhub has a moderation team, it's far smaller than that of mainstream social media sites, and Kristof found it couldn't effectively block even the most obnoxious videos.
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With increasing public pressure, Pornhub's owner – a shadowy Canada-based porn conglomerate called MindGeek – took several steps on Wednesday to slow the spread of harmful material. Pornhub has banned uploads by unverified users, which should reduce the amount of abusive material uploaded to the site. Pornhub has also disabled video downloading, which should make it more difficult for users to save a copy of an abusive video in order to re-upload it to Pornhub or another website.
But these steps don't seem to please Visa and Mastercard. In a statement to the New York Times, Mastercard said it had "confirmed violations of our standards that prohibit illegal content."
Visa said it had "directed the financial institutions serving MindGeek to suspend processing of payments over the Visa network" while further investigating the issue.
While Kristof seems to have inspired the latest moves against Pornhub, the pressure on the site has been mounting for months. In February, the BBC reported on a 14-year-old girl who was raped and repeatedly uploaded a video of the crime to Pornhub. US law enforcement of the owners of GirlsDoPorn, a website that allowed women to participate in porn through fraud and coercion, has also put Pornhub into focus. GirlsDoPorn videos have been viewed a million times on Pornhub.
