Karley Cicale, FISM News
In a small victory for those in the fight against human trafficking and non-consensual sexual exploitation, Pornhub’s Instagram account was disabled Wednesday night for it’s violations of Instagram’s Community Guidelines.
“We have zero tolerance when it comes to sharing sexual content involving minors or threatening to post intimate images of others,” the guidelines state. Pornhub is the 10th most visited website in the world, with 42 billion visits and 6 million videos uploaded per year and is known for it’s demeaning and destructive sexual videos.
The Internet Watch Foundation was pivotal in verifying the condemning evidence. The foundation’s Instagram account describes themselves as a “leading child protection tech charity working to remove images and videos of child sexual abuse from the internet no matter where they’re hosted.” In this case, they managed to assist taking down the social media account of a company with at least 118 cases of child rape, sexual abuse and trafficking confirmed on their site in the three year period between Jan 2017 and October 2019.
The hashtag #traffickinghub has been circulating over this victory, as part of a global movement. Laila Mickelwait, CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and Traffickinghub is intent on shutting down not only PornHub’s Instagram account, but the website itself, and calling out companies who allow the site to exist, function, and distribute illegal and exploitative content. She told The Post Millennial:
Today Instagram did what it should have done well over a year ago, it took a stand against Pornhub, a company well known for monetizing and globally distributing sex crime scenes. No legitimate company that has any value for human rights should have anything to do with Pornhub or its parent company MindGeek. It is time for Twitter and all other social media platforms to de-platform this mega sex trafficker and stop allowing its executives an avenue to peddle criminal abuse to the masses for profit. Shut it down.”
In 2020, Traffickinghub announced that they were successful in convincing Visa, Mastercard and Discover to sever their business relationship with Pornhub. Still, they assert that much work is to be done to take down the company.
Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek was already found guilty of heinous exploitation and slapped with an $80 million lawsuit by women victimized by it’s GirlsDoPorn sex-trafficking scheme. Women were lured in by online ads looking for clothing models, then subsequently coerced or even forced into doing pornographic shoots, which they were told wouldn’t be circulated beyond private sales. In actuality, the content from these shoots garnered MindGeek $17 million in profit before an arrest warrant was issued for the scheme’s leader.
Traffickinghub’s ongoing petition, which currently has 2,220,362 signatures, states:
Pornhub, the world’s largest and most popular porn site, has been repeatedly caught enabling, hosting, and profiting from videos of child rape, sex trafficking, and other forms of non-consensual content exploiting women and minors. We’re calling for Pornhub to be shut down and its executives held accountable for these crimes.”
Visit https://traffickinghubpetition.com/ if you’d like to support the foundations efforts.