NEW YORK—In a move that's been anticipated for more than a week, credit card issuers Mastercard and Visa have announced today that they won't allow Pornhub users to use their credit cards to make charges on the adult content site.
Although censorship groups—most notably the National Coalition on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE)—have tried for years to get major credit card issuers to ban charges from sexually explicit sites on their cards—American Express banned such charges several years ago—the controversy came to a head with the publication in The New York Times on December 4 of an extensive opinion column by Nicholas Kristof titled "The Children of Pornhub." Kristof, long an opponent of sexual speech online, charged that Pornhub is "infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags... A great majority of the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each year probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and nonconsensual violence. Because it’s impossible to be sure whether a youth in a video is 14 or 18, neither Pornhub nor anyone else has a clear idea of how much content is illegal."
Kristof went on to describe several situations where videos posted to Pornhub had keywords such as "rape," "young tiny teen," "degraded teen," "very young teen" and similar descriptive terms that could refer to underage and other illegal content, and cited a case where an underage girl who'd been talked into providing a nude video of herself found that video posted to Pornhub, and how she became suicidal as a result.
Kristof also took Pornhub to task both for failing to monitor more closely the videos posted to its site, and for eschewing responsibility for such postings because they were done by the site's users with no input from the company itself, as is currently the law under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996—a section that religious conservatives and pro-censorship groups have been trying to get removed for more than a decade.
Reaction to Kristof's column was immediate. The day after it saw print, NCOSE sent an email to its supporters claiming, "This is what we’ve been working towards. The tipping point in our war. Pornhub will soon fall. We need your help right now though. The next week will make a big difference!
"Pornhub profits off of the abuse of hundreds, likely thousands, of victims of child sexual abuse, sex trafficking, rape, and non-consensually produced pornography uploaded to their website." (Emphasis in original)
The email urged readers to "Contact your Member of Congress NOW!" to urge it to "Investigate Pornhub and #ShutItDown" as well as "Rescind CDA 230 Immunity."
Pornhub itself reacted nearly as swiftly to the controversy, and on December 8 published new terms of service that included a ban on any user uploading content to the site unless done by a Pornhub content partner or "people within the Model Program"; banning downloads from the site by anyone, with the exception of "paid downloads within the verified Model Program"; and promised that "a newly established 'Red Team' will be dedicated solely to self-auditing the platform for potentially illegal material. The Red Team provides an extra layer of protection on top of the existing protocol, proactively sweeping content already uploaded for potential violations and identifying any breakdowns in the moderation process that could allow a piece of content that violates the Terms of Service." It also promised to "regularly monitor search terms within the platform for increases in phrasings that attempt to bypass the safeguards in place."
The company also said that it had partnered with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children “in order to transparently report and limit incidents of child sexual abuse material on our platform,” and that it will release a transparency report in 2021.
But Pornhub's promises were to no avail, as both Visa and Mastercard reported that they had begun separate investigations into Kristof's charges against the company—and that in the interim, both companies were suspending their users' ability to charge products and services on Pornhub.
“Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site,” Mastercard said in a statement Thursday. “We instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance.”
“We are instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek to suspend processing of payments through the Visa network,” pending the completion of its investigation, Visa said in a separate statement.
But that's not all. According to Bloomberg.com, "Mastercard said it’s continuing to investigate potential illegal content on other websites," most likely XVideos, which Kristof also targeted in his hit piece.
However, as an article on BusinessStandard.com noted, "Mastercard and its rival Visa Inc. don’t work directly with retailers. Instead, websites seeking to accept credit and debit cards sign up with a bank known as a merchant acquirer to help them process payments. ... Mastercard said in its statement that when it identifies illegal activity on its network, it typically asks the merchant acquirer to terminate the relationship unless an effective compliance plan is put in place."
Exactly how these new directives will play out with the myriad of payment processing companies that serve the adult industry is unknown, but they're likely quite worried about the card companies' new restrictions.
Fact is, Kristof has a long history of targeting the adult industry. Way back on October 5, 1986, in a NY Times column titled "X-Rated Industry In A Slump," he claimed, "WALK into an ''adult' bookstore almost anywhere in the country, and you see piles of magazines: Orgy, Consenting Adults, Insatiables, to name a few of the more demure titles. There are shelves of sexual paraphernalia. And there is the pornography industry's fastest-growing offering: racks of video cassettes, with breathless headlines and glossy packaging, that show overdeveloped young people in positions never found in Grey's Anatomy. Most important, however, is what you don't see: lots of shoppers."
He went on to claim that, "In the last few years, at least half of the nation's adult movie theaters have closed down. Playboy Magazine's circulation has tumbled, and its cable television channel is losing subscribers. Its female counterpart, Playgirl Magazine, is reorganizing its finances in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. Even sales of X-rated videos, once the industry's best hope, have leveled off."
Current fans of explicit material can judge for themselves whether Kristof was correct—or full of shit. However, as BusinessStandard.com noted, "Processing payments for pornography websites has long divided the payments and banking industry, and sex workers have claimed they’ve had their bank accounts shut down after lenders learned of their profession."
Almost needless to say, NCOSE is overjoyed with the new restrictions—and couldn't wait to get the word out to its supporters.
"Finally, finally, finally!" its December 10 email began. "Writing to you through tears of gratitude to tell you that both Visa and Mastercard have decided to cut ties with Pornhub! Thanks to YOU, the dominoes are falling and we are seeing RESULTS! The brave voices of survivors and victims of pornography have been heard! You have helped to create a groundswell thanks to your support behind them!
"Visa and Mastercard are finally choosing to reject profits from sexual exploitation. Please join us in giving a hearty 'Thank you!' to these companies, and to encourage them to continue looking into other pornography sites that still may be hosting videos with themes of violence against women, incest, racism, and videos of forced sex acts, sex trafficking and child sexual abuse victims."
But what's abundantly clear from NCOSE's support of Visa's and Mastercard's actions is that NCOSE is out to destroy Americans', even the world's, access to sexually explicit materials. This was pointed out in an article by sex-positive writer Maggie McNeill for Reason magazine, "Visa and Mastercsard Submit to Politicians Trying to Put the Squeeze on Pornhub."
"Individual sex workers and brick-and-mortar sex businesses (such as massage parlors or strip clubs) can be attacked via police violence and prosecutorial harassment, but that's not as easy when the target is a popular website hosting user-generated content," she wrote. "When any severed head of the sex hydra is replaced by hundreds of others, the only remaining strategy is to strike at the body by cutting off the resources it needs to survive... Like Backpage, Pornhub is entirely composed of user-generated material; it should therefore be fairly bulletproof, thanks to the aforementioned Section 230. But that law is under attack from politicians of both major parties, and... Mastercard and Visa have already caved; more companies may join them soon—and if they don't, you shouldn't be surprised if a legislative or regulatory stick soon follows."
As a result of Kristof's column and screeds like this from the pro-censorship industry (not to mention NCOSE's Dawn Hawkins' letter to the editor which The Times published today), Pornhub will likely find itself in dire financial straits—and may have to find a way to issue its own brand of credit card for users to charge purchases to its site.
UPDATE: Pornhub has responded to AVN's request for comment on this situation, and has provided 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 (IWF) 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."
"Everyday sites that you and I might use as social networks or other communications tools, they pose more of an issue of child sexual abuse material than Pornhub does,” said IWF spokeswoman Emma Hardy.
Regarding child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and illegal content on its site, Pornhub stated:
"Eliminating illegal content and ridding the internet of child sexual abuse material is one of the most crucial issues facing online platforms today, and it requires the unwavering commitment and collective action of all parties.
"Due to the nature of our industry, people's preconceived notions of Pornhub's values and processes often differ from reality, but it is counterproductive to ignore the facts regarding a subject as serious as CSAM. Any assertion that we allow CSAM is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue. We have zero tolerance for CSAM. Pornhub is unequivocally committed to combating CSAM, and has instituted an industry-leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate illegal material from our community.
"According to leading non-profits, advocates and third-party analyses, Pornhub’s safeguards and technologies have proven effective: while platforms intended to be family friendly like Facebook reported that it removed 84,100,000 incidents of CSAM over two-and-a-half years, Instagram reported that it removed 4,452,000 incidents of CSAM over one-and-a-half years, and Twitter reported that it suspended 1,466,398 unique accounts for CSAM over two years, the Internet Watch Foundation, the leading independent authority on CSAM, reported 118 incidents of CSAM on Pornhub in a three-year period.
"Pornhub has actively worked to employ extensive measures to protect the platform from such content. These measures include a vast team of human moderators dedicated to manually reviewing every single upload, a thorough system for flagging, reviewing and removing illegal material, robust parental controls, and a variety of automated detection technologies. These technologies include:
• "CSAI Match, YouTube’s proprietary technology for combating Child Sexual Abuse Imagery online.
• "Content Safety API, Google's artificial intelligence tool that helps detect illegal imagery.
• "PhotoDNA, Microsoft’s technology that aids in finding and removing known images of child exploitation.
• "Vobile, a fingerprinting software that scans any new uploads for potential matches to unauthorized materials to protect against banned videos being re-uploaded to the platform."
