Mastercard And Visa Will No Longer Process Payments On Pornhub
Following an explosive New York Times article earlier this week detailing the presence of child abuse, revenge porn, and rape videos on Pornhub, credit card companies Mastercard and Visa have announced today that they’ll no longer process payments for Pornhub.
“Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site,” Mastercard said. They added, “As a result, and in accordance with our policies, we instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance.”
Visa has not concluded their own investigation yet, but wrote, “Given the allegations of illegal activity, Visa is suspending Pornhub’s acceptance privileges pending the completion of our ongoing investigation. We are instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek to suspend processing of payments through the Visa network.”
Pornhub and parent company MindGeek have not yet responded to Mastercard and Visa’s statements, but this is, obviously, a massive and catastrophic loss of revenue for the world’s biggest porn conglomerate, not to mention all of the sex workers who sell their videos on Pornhub premium.
“Pornhub Premium”—the section of Pornhub where members pay to view performers’ self-produced videos as well as content from porn studios—typically costs $9.99/month and, before today, could be joined using Mastercard, Visa, JCB, or Discover credit cards. JCB and Discover have not yet suspended use of their cards on the site. Payment processor PayPal pulled out of Pornhub last year, citing “certain business payments [Pornhub] made through PayPal without seeking our permission.”
The NYT piece profiled several young women who were victims of revenge porn, as videos of them—some of which were recorded when they were underage—were uploaded to Pornhub repeatedly by unknown users. The article also reported that many videos posted on the site depicted sexual assault of children, while others showed assaults on unconscious women and girls.
In response to the exposé, Pornhub announced on Tuesday that they had overhauled their safety measures, banned video downloads, and would now only allow verified users to upload videos. These changes, obviously, were too little, too late for Mastercard and Visa.
ADDED:
Pornhub has issued the below statement in response to the decisions from Mastercard and Visa:
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.
