Lauren Pineda
If you pay for a Pornhub subscription, you will now have to make sure you’re not using a Visa or Mastercard as your form of payment. Look, whatever you do in your free time is your business, but you might want to make sure you do a deep dive into what you’re putting your money, especially your credit cards, into.
Videos by Rare
Columnist Nicholas Kristof for the New York Times reported that Pornhub, one of the largest and most popular pornography platforms, actually included videos of child abuse and rape. He explained that he found out of all the consensual videos that do get uploaded to Pornhub, there were also videos of rape and child sexual abuse material, including underage girls who had been victims of assault and trafficking.
Kristof wrote, “In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them,” explaining how the Youtube of porn was still profiting off the illegal content.
Nicholas Kristof Reports Illegal Content On Pornhub
Update: Serena Fleites, the homeless girl who had been exploited by Pornhub at 14, moved into a hotel room today with the help of readers who backed a gofundme: https://t.co/h89pxZZjD9 (original story here: https://t.co/syVIjZgEy6 ) More on my Instagram/FB pages. Thank you!! pic.twitter.com/CKCPjWoFnt
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) December 7, 2020
This caused both credit card companies Visa and Mastercard to do a deep dive into their financial transactions with MindGeek, the adult website’s parent company. Mastercard said in a statement that their investigation, “confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site,” resulting in their termination of using its cards on the site.
Visa also said, “We are instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek to suspend the processing of payments through the Visa network,” rounding towards the end of their investigation and also leaning towards the potential banning of use of its cards.
Visa and Mastercard Pull Use of Their Credit Cards From Pornhub
Pornhub responded by saying that their site has made changes in preventing sexual exploitation, sexual assault, child pornography, illegal activity, and other illegal material. Pornhub’s platform history has been known to have potential illegal content, also including revenge porn, where people are uploading videos of sexual activity without the actual consent of any one person in the video.
I could make jokes about how COVID and the coronavirus pandemic have given excuses as to why Pornhub could be processing payments more than it ever has before from American Express cards. But there is absolutely nothing funny about sexually exploiting anyone, much less, children who have gone through something traumatically life-altering. You know better, and you can do better.
