Visa and Mastercard both announced December 10 that they will no longer allow the use of their cards on streaming platform Pornhub, after an investigative op-ed published in The New York Times detailed instances of underage videos being posted to the site.
Just days after Pornhub announced sweeping changes to its uploads policies—including a verified user requirement—Mastercard announced that its investigation into the site’s user-generated content “confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site” and would no longer allow Mastercard holders to use their cards on the site.
Visa, meanwhile, announced that it is suspending payment processing on the site until it concludes its own investigation. Additionally, Mastercard announced that it will conduct investigations across other sites. It is unclear if they are including social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter in that investigation.
American Express and PayPal previously prevented their users from processing payment on the site.
UPDATED: Pornhub released the following statement regarding the news:
These actions are exceptionally disappointing, as they come just two days after Pornhub instituted the most far-reaching safeguards in user-generated platform history. Unverified users are now banned from uploading content — a policy no other platform has put in place, including Facebook, which reported 84 million instances of child sexual abuse material over the last three years. In comparison, the Internet Watch Foundation reported 118 incidents on Pornhub over the last three years. This news is crushing for the hundreds of thousands of models who rely on our platform for their livelihoods.
