LOS ANGELES—Less than two weeks after the credit card processing giant Visa announced it would ban payments from porn sites owned by MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub, the card issuers has at least partially reversed course. According to a report by the news agency Reuters on Wednesday, Visa will allow use if its cards on some MindGeek-owned sites — but not Pornhub.
In a statement, a Visa spokesperson said that sites that offer only “professionally produced” content will now be permitted to process user payments through Visa. Sites that offer user-generated videos and images remain barred from using Visa cards.
The exact meaning of “professionally produced” remained unclear from the Visa statement. The spokesperson said only that the new policy would apply to sites confining their offerings to “adult studio content.” But whether Visa would publish an approved list of “studios,” or get any more specific at all went unstated.
Visa’s main rival in the credit card payment industry, Mastercard, also banned payments from Mindgeek sites, but that company had given no indication as of Thursday that it would relax that ban in any way, even for sites that offer only “professionally produced” content.
The credit card bans were announced a week after a New York Times feature by columnist Nicholas Kristof, and titled “The Children of Pornhub,” alleged that Pornhub was "infested with rape videos,” and that 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.”
Pornhub responded by announcing that it had “banned unverified uploaders from posting new content, eliminated downloads, and partnered with dozens of non-profit organizations, among other major policy changes.”
Pornhub also said that had “suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or members of the Model Program,” saying that its new policy was more strict in regulating unverified content than any policy implemented by major social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Those measures apparently were not enough for Visa to end its ban on Pornhub payments. In its statement December 14, Pornhub appeared to question the motives of its critics, who claim to be concerned only about stopping illegal material such as nonconsensual sexually explicit videos and those involving children. But those groups are, in fact, dedicated to shutting down a wide range of legal sexual expression as well, the company stated.
“It is clear that Pornhub is being targeted not because of our policies and how we compare to our peers, but because we are an adult content platform,” the statement said.
Pornhub said that its critics, including the anti-porn groups “Exodus Cry” and the “National Center on Sexual Exploitation,” are “dedicated to abolishing pornography, banning material they claim is obscene, and shutting down commercial sex work. These are the same forces that have spent 50 years demonizing Playboy, the National Endowment for the Arts, sex education, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and even the American Library Association. Today, it happens to be Pornhub.”
Photo By profivideos / Pixabay
