James Delahunty
11 Dec 2020 2:04
Pornhub highlights double-standards, concerns about income to models, following Mastercard, and Visa suspension.
Mastercard and Visa will no longer handle payments for massive adult entertainment platform. Coming just days after Pornhub announced strict new rules for its service, Visa and Mastercard have cut off the adult website.
Following a New York Times investigation that exposed exploitative and illegal content on the massive platform, along with deficiencies in monitoring uploaded content, Pornhub imposed new restrictions on users of the service.
It changes its policies so that users who upload content to the service will have to have their identity verified. Additionally, it banned the downloading of most content available on the service.
"Today, the use of our cards at Pornhub is being terminated. Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content.... we continue to investigate potential illegal content on other websites," a Mastercard statement received by NYT's Nicholas Kristof reads.
After Mastercard's decision was revealed, Visa suspended Pornhub's acceptance privileges pending an ongoing investigation. Naturally, Pornhub is more than miffed by the moves and seemingly wishes to highlight double standards in its defense.
"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." a statement from Pornhub reads.
"This news is crushing for the hundreds of thousands of models who rely on our platform for their livelihoods."