Mastercard And Visa Cuts Ties With Porn-Hub As Investigations Continues
As the fight against widespread child abuse and human trafficking, one of the biggest adult movie streaming websites Porn-Hub has been dealt a heavy blow with ongoing investigations on child abuse and rape-related videos continue.
Mastercard has been one of the latest financial giants to have blocked its services from being rendered by Porn-Hub. With over more than 100 Million master card users, Porn-Hub is set to count its losses on purchases of adult content.
Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site.
We instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance, -Mastercard said in a statement.
Mastercard move comes after fellow payment giant, Visa also removed its service from the website.
An investigation by a New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof alleged that Pornhub continued to give its users access to child porn and rape-related videos.
The award-winning journalist had fingered Mastercard as one of many companies that promoted Pornhub’s content by giving users access to the site.
But Pornhub and its parent company, MindGeek refuted these claims.
Mastercard And Visa Cuts Ties With Porn-Hub As Investigations Continues
Pornhub claims it removed all child porn-related videos from its servers. It indicated that it recently introduced a user verification method to only allow verified people to upload content.
A download button has also been removed from all contents. This was meant to regulate how content is uploaded and distributed.
After Mastercard announced that it was breaking ties with the adult content site. Pornhub called out the payment company’s actions as “exceptionally disappointing”.
This because Pornhub claims to be the only website that has instituted the most far-reaching safeguards in user-generated platform history, two days ago.
Unlike Facebook, which was found to have more than 84 million instances of child porn, the Internet Watch Foundation only found 118 instances from Pornhub.
Hence, the adult-content site claims Mastercard’s actions were unfair. Pornhub is free to access. And previously, users were allowed to freely download content from the site.
But those who wanted quality, unedited and exclusive content could only access it by a method of payment using either Visa or Mastercard.
Over the years, the website has gained popularity across the globe.
In its annual report, Pornhub says it received over 42 billion users in 2019. The site also mentioned that more than 6, 83 million videos uploaded in that year.