Pornhub, one of the largest porn sites, will no longer be usable with Mastercard or Visa in the future. The two financial services companies are thus reacting to an article in the New York Times in which they were asked to end their cooperation in view of the large amount of illegal content on the porn platform.
Illegal content on porn hub
Until a few days ago, anyone could upload content to Pornhub without being checked. Among these contents are researches of the New York Times according to numerous illegal videos, which are for example child pornographic or were taken up and/or put into the Internet without consent of the shown ones. In one article, the two major payment service providers Visa and Mastercard, which cooperated with Pornhub, were asked to stop cooperating with Pornhub in view of the latter’s business practices, thus making it considerably more difficult to promote such content.
Both companies then announced an investigation. Mastercard concluded this investigation after a short time and announced that it would no longer cooperate with the platform in the future. Although the investigations at Visa are ongoing, the cooperation will at least be paused during the ongoing investigations.
Reaction of Pornhub
Pornhub was disappointed by the reaction of the payment service providers and pointed out, among other things, that two days before the end of the cooperation, a new directive had come into force, which was aimed precisely at making it significantly more difficult to disseminate illegal content on the platform. In fact, since then the uploading of videos has only been possible for verified users.
Pornhub also pointed out that in the last three years, only 118 cases of child pornography were reported on the platform, which is negligible compared to the 84 million cases that were reported on Facebook in the same period. The numbers were also mentioned in the article in the New York Times – but there they were interpreted as an indication of a lack of control.
Even independent providers affected
Not only Pornhub itself will be hard hit by the termination of the cooperation, but also the many independent providers of pornographic material who use Pornhub as a platform for distributing their paid content. In the future, access to this content will no longer be possible with Visa and Mastercard credit cards. However, supporting products such as those from Bedbible.com can of course still be purchased.
