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Instagram has finally removed the official account of PornHub as pressures mounted ceaselessly.
The PornHub account boasted of 13.1-million followers and 6,200 posts. Meta did not say why it removed the account, but sources have argued it must have been because of pressure from activists for violating Instagram’s community guidelines.
Note that criticism of PornHub for facilitating the distribution of child abuse material has grown in recent years, implicating its business partners and leading to the resignation of its CEO and COO. In 2020, Visa and Mastercard stopped processing payments on PornHub due to the presence of “unlawful content” on the site, though this hasn’t stopped lawsuits proceeding against the companies. In August, a California judge allowed a lawsuit against Visa to continue, arguing that the company “intended to help MindGeek monetize child porn.”
In response to criticisms in the past, PornHub had taken steps like removing all content from unverified users and removing a download function that let any user download any video.
While IG never mentioned the reason for its decision, anti-PornHub campaigners like Laila Mickelwait have hinted that the account was taken down for violating Instagram’s community guidelines.
In a statement posted on Twitter, Mickelwait said Instagram and Meta had made the “right decision by cutting ties with Pornhub” and that it was time for other big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to “follow suit.”
Mickelwait said: “Traffickinghub is not owned by any organization” and “is not aimed at the legal porn industry, but is exclusively focused on shutting down Pornhub for the criminal exploitation of countless victims.”
Mickelwait is the founder of the “TraffickingHub” campaign: an advocacy group devoted to “shutting down Pornhub and holding its executives accountable for enabling, distributing and profiting from rape, child abuse, sex trafficking and criminal image based sexual abuse.”
Pornhub is a Canadian-owned internet pornography website. It is one of several pornographic video-streaming websites owned by MindGeek. As of June 2020, Pornhub is the 10th most trafficked website in the world and the third most-trafficked adult website after XVideos and XNXX.
Incidents have been reported of Pornhub hosting non-consensual pornography.The company has been criticized for slow or inadequate responses to some of these incidents, including the hosting of the high-profile channel GirlsDoPorn, which was closed in 2019 following a lawsuit and charges of sex trafficking.
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