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| photo credit: Ivan Radic / Flickr |
Pornhub is guilty of enabling sex trafficking and rape through its website. It
doesn't require people who upload videos on the site to confirm the age of the
people portrayed in their videos, nor whether they gave consent to the sexual
acts shown. The organization Exodus Cry, which fights against child and sex trafficking, created a short video explaining how Pornhub
enables and profits from these crimes.
In response to allegations that the company profits from the sexual exploitation of others, both Mastercard and Visa announced last week that they would be blocking payments from their cards to the website. Mastercard has suggested
that it has permanently blocked the use of its cards on the website, while
Visa says that its cards are suspended while the company completes a more thorough investigation. American Express told the Associated Press last week
that its cards were already blocked from usage on "digital adult content
websites."
Mastercard told the Daily Caller
that it had already completed an investigation which “confirmed violations of
our standards prohibiting unlawful content” on Pornhub.
On Dec. 14,
VICE reported
that Pornhub has taken a dramatic move to remove all non-verified content on
the website from public access. The website, which previously hosted roughly
13.5 million videos, seems to have blocked over 10 million videos in this
process.
After victims of sexual violence are forced or manipulated to commit sexual
acts against their wills, they are often similarly pushed toward abortions.
The actions that financial institutions are taking against Pornhub and its
Canadian parent company MindGeek are doing far more than the Canadian or American governments have ever done to hold the pornography giant accountable for the role it has played
in enabling sex-trafficking.
