Mastercard claims to have terminated the use of its cards on the porn site Pornhub after a review confirmed that there was illegal content.
An investigation by the New York Times accuses the platform of being “full” of child abuse and rape videos.
Pornhub, who has denied the allegations, called Mastercard’s actions “very disappointing”.
Why?
Visa, another giant company has suspended the use of its cards on site pending the outcome of its review.
Mastercard launched its investigation after Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof named it in his New York Times article, saying he “doesn’t see why search engines, banks or credit card companies” should “promote” Pornhub.
“Our investigation over the past few days has confirmed the violation of our standards prohibiting illegal content on their site,” a statement from Mastercard said. “We have instructed financial institutions that link this site to our network to finalize their acceptance.”
The company said it was still investigating illegal content on some websites.
Pornhub’s Response
Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek previously said the allegations made in the New York Times were “baseless and untrue”.
But the site has removed its download function and said users should be guaranteed to upload videos.
Responding to Mastercard’s decision, Pornhub’s statement on Thursday said: “These actions are very disappointing, as they come just two days after Pornhub introduced the most comprehensive protections in the history of user-generated platforms.
“Unverified users have now been banned from uploading content – a policy that no other policy has set, including Facebook, which has reported 84 million incidents of child sexual abuse over the past three years. By comparison, the Internet Watch Foundation has reported 118 incidents on Pornhub over the past three years. past. “
It also added: “These news pressures hundreds of thousands of models who rely on our platform for their livelihood.”
The Statistics
Pornhub is free to use but users can pay £ 9.99 per month to get high quality video streaming and ad-free and exclusive content.
Its content is heavily uploaded by its community and viewed publicly. However, the company said all uploaded videos were reviewed by human moderators.
In its most recent annual review, Pornhub said it had 42 billion visitors in 2019 and uploaded more than 6.83 million videos, with a combined viewing time of 169 years. It did not say how many presidents it hired.
Kristof said a search for “under-age” videos has yielded more results and while not all children have been included, some have.
Pornhub said it was “absolutely intolerant” of child sexual abuse and used a combination of tools from Google, YouTube and Microsoft to help it detect and remove illegal content.
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