Growing calls for credit card companies to reject porn sites

With the launch of a new campaign this past week, Freedom United joins a growing coalition of organizations calling on credit card companies to cut ties with pornographic sites such as Pornhub on the basis that they facilitate trafficking.

In a new letter to ten major credit card companies, activists and campaigners called for the immediate suspension of payments to pornographic sites as a result of their failure to prevent exploitative content.                                                                  

Pornhub, one of the world’s most visited pornography sites, has been under scrutiny for exploitative content for several months.

Last year, the owners of a Pornhub content provider named GirlsDoPorn were charged by the FBI with coercing women into making pornographic films.

In a separate case, a Florida man was charged for sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl and posting footage of the attack on Pornhub last October.

While Pornhub claims that it removes unauthorized content as soon as it comes to light, these high-profile cases are only the tip of the iceberg: the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation found 118 child sexual abuse and rape items on the site between 2017 and 2019.

A report by the India Child Protection Fund (ICPF), meanwhile, found a sharp rise in demand for child abuse videos on pornography sites in India—particularly during the current pandemic.

BBC reports:

The letter alleges it is impossible to “judge or verify consent in any videos on their site, let alone live webcam videos” which “inherently makes pornography websites a target for sex traffickers, child abusers, and others sharing predatory nonconsensual videos”.

“We’ve been seeing an increasingly global outcry about the harms of pornography sharing websites in a number of ways in recent months,” said Haley McNamara, the director of the UK-based International Centre on Sexual Exploitation, the international arm of the NCOSE and a signatory of the letter.

“We in the international child advocacy and anti-sexual exploitation community are demanding financial institutions to critically analyse their supportive role in the pornography industry, and to cut ties with them,” she told the BBC.

Credit card companies are key players in the movement because pornography sites rely on them to process payments and therefore generate profit for continued operation.

Paypal is the only major online payment company that has thus far blocked payments to Pornhub, but the site said this move alone had a significant impact on revenue.

Mastercard has promised to investigate the letter’s claims, stating that the company would “terminate [pornography sites’] connection to our network” if they confirmed illegal activity by a cardholder.

American Express has blocked transactions on high-risk digital content—including all online pornography—since 2000, but was included as a recipient because certain recent offers on pornography sites contradict this stance.

Freedom United’s new Reject Pornhub campaign specifically supports the Traffickinghub campaign, which was founded by activist Laila Mickelwait and has gathered over 800,000 signatures.

We’ve written to Visa, Mastercard, and Discover bringing Pornhub’s trafficking links to their attention, and now we’re mobilizing as many members of the Freedom United community as we can to do the same.

Take a stand against trafficking and join the campaign today.