In a continuing wave of public controversy for one of the world’s biggest free porn sites, a few huge consumer brands have announced that they will no longer advertise on Pornhub given recent reports about nonconsensual and exploitative content being posted to the platform.
One of them is PayPal, the other two are Heinz—yes, the ketchup brand—and Unilever, who owns big brands like Axe and Dove.
Here’s what happened.
PayPal calls it quits with Pornhub
Late Wednesday night this week, Pornhub announced that the payment service would no longer be participating with payouts through the platform.
According to a Vice report, Pornhub allows performers to upload, sell, and otherwise monetize videos they make themselves. Performers who used PayPal to get paid for this work now have to switch to a different payment method.
A PayPal spokesperson told Motherboard: “Following a review, we have discovered that Pornhub has made certain business payments through PayPal without seeking our permission. We have taken action to stop these transactions from occurring.”
The notice of the payment system change went out to hundreds of thousands of site users who upload content to the platform, including to people whose videos were wrongly uploaded to Pornhub. Yikes.
As for what, exactly, pushed PayPal to the edge and made them call it quits with Pornhub, there have been no precise details reported on that yet. PayPal’s acceptable use policy forbids “certain sexually oriented materials or services,” which, as Vice points out, is murky enough phrasing to give PayPal leeway to make decisions like this.
But it could have something to do with the recent reports of the massive porn site profiting from nonconsensually uploaded videos and rape tapes of sex trafficking victims that have come to light in the last couple of weeks.
But unfortunately for Pornhub, PayPal isn’t the only one walking away from working with the site.
Unilever and Kraft dip out
Unilever hosted a campaign for their razor delivery company Dollar Shave Club on the porn platform, and Kraft Heinz previously took over Pornhub’s homepage for a day to advertise their frozen food brand under the justification that #foodporn is a “cultural phenomenon.” Classy.
Related: One-Sided Orgasms: Pornhub’s Most Popular Videos Don’t Show Mutual Pleasure
But after a recent investigation by the Sunday Times newspaper, revealing dozens of examples of illegal content of underage teens and content featuring adults performing sex acts in front of teens on Pornhub, both conglomerates have distanced themselves from the porn website to avoid normalizing a brand that hosts child pornography and illicit material.
We hope other big brands follow suit.
Abusive images are not a genre
Here’s the bottom line: Pornhub and other massive porn tube sites like it make money off of nonconsensual images and videos. This is a fact, and an issue that’s seemingly not going to be addressed or stopped by the porn giant any time soon.
Instead of addressing potentially illegally uploaded content, the site will turn it into a genre like “leaked sex tapes” or even more obvious, “revenge porn.” These terms start trending or driving traffic and clicks, which leads to more advertising revenue and even more user content uploaded to the site. It’s a cycle that they don’t seem to have a true interest in breaking.
Related: Porn Tube Sites Are Free, So How Does The Porn Industry Make Money Today?
Of course, not every video in these categories is stolen or illegally uploaded, though. Production studios and amateur porn performers follow trends on Pornhub. They are working for consumer eyeballs, too. If “stolen teen Snapchat videos” is getting a lot of attention, they may create a scene to mimic the authentic videos. But the problem is, it becomes all the more difficult to determine what’s legit and what isn’t—these professionally-produced videos make it difficult to identify illegal content while also encouraging consumer appetites to want more.
If Pornhub were serious about stopping image-based sexual abuse, they would work to prevent these kinds of images from being uploaded in the first place. The technology is out there, and yet it hasn’t been implemented.
Despite all the press the porn site has gotten lately for potentially donating $100 or so to clean up a single dirty beach, Pornhub is not deserving of praise for their “charitable” causes.
In fact, the only press Pornhub should be getting should be to shine a light on the trafficking victims, image-based abuse victims, hidden camera victims, and sexual assault victims whose abuse is displayed prominently on the tube site and profited from daily.
Join us in refusing to click, and spreading the word that Pornhub is doing anything but charity to society. We hope to see more brands refuse to work with them and not be complicit in the spread of videos of trafficking victims and victims of exploitation.
