This is a post because I want to express the inequality and I want to call for justice for all.
This is not meant as a personal opinion or judgment, this post is about showing and talking about corruption and stupid hard-headed people who are threatening millions of people's life. This post shows what effects it has when your loaner cutoffs your daily income and what consequence it has for those who are working in an underrated industry but still behind the scenes it is about humans who are doing a job and wanted to earn money legally.
I am talking about it because it makes me mad to see that millions of people are suffering from these actions and that there is no solution for that as of the moment. I cannot be quiet because people are being treated like dumb asses. If no one talks about it, nothing in this world will change.
This post is about
'War Against Sex Workers:' What Visa and Mastercard Dropping Pornhub Means to Performers
//The world's biggest credit card companies terminated service to Pornhub, and performers on the site say it could seriously harm their livelihoods.
This week, Visa and Mastercard cut ties with Pornhub, decision sex workers say will only harm their industry, and won't actually help victims of non-consensual imagery.
In what seemed to be a bit of good news on Tuesday, Pornhub announced that it would change its policies to only allow verified users to upload content to, or download from, the platform—as well as enact a more robust moderation process. This was a welcome shift and was a long time coming: non-consensual sexual imagery activists, as well as performers whose work is often pirated and reposted to Pornhub, have been asking for these changes for years.
The verified users that are now the only ones able to upload or download to Pornhub are also suddenly unable to receive payouts through the two biggest credit card companies.
Sex workers and activists say that this is a dangerous, discriminatory decision—one fueled by anti-porn campaigners and conservative activist groups who want sex work abolished.
In a statement published Friday, Sex Workers Outreach Project Behind Bars wrote that the decision will force more sex workers into the margins, calling it a "war" on sex workers.
"We say 'war against sex workers' because the damage they do does not impact the labor as much as it affects the laborers who depend on the Pornhub platform to earn a living," it wrote. "[...] Violence against sex workers includes the societal and institutional violence that has led to the shuttering of the online platforms that give us a measure of safety and allow us the critical resource that is the ability to access banking."
“If they can be shut down or hurt by this campaign, what hope is there for smaller platforms?”
All of these changes came days after a piece published by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, which highlighted the plight of child sexual abuse survivors whose images were posted Pornhub. Despite writing about an issue that's been used as political ammunition to censor adult content on the internet for decades—including the deeply harmful Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2018—he barely cited performers who use the site or sex worker rights activists.
Instead, he opted to name-check Traffickinghub, a campaign run by conservative religious anti-trafficking organization Exodus Cry, which opposes decriminalizing sex work and wants to abolish porn altogether.
In that opinion piece, Kristof directly calls for payment processors to drop Pornhub: "And call me a prude, but I don’t see why search engines, banks, or credit card companies should bolster a company that monetizes sexual assaults on children or unconscious women. If PayPal can suspend cooperation with Pornhub, so can American Express, Mastercard, and Visa," he wrote. "I don’t see any neat solution."
Much of the content on Pornhub is free to view, but for many performers, Pornhub was a stable revenue stream. The platform's verified Amateur Program, as well as the clip selling service Modelhub and ad revenue made on video uploads, make up a constellation of ways performers can make money on Pornhub. Kristof's inability to see a "neat solution" erases the fact that many people rely on tube sites like Pornhub for their livelihoods, even though these sites are incredibly flawed. It's not prudish to suggest child exploitation should stop and it's willfully ignorant to suggest that it would be; everyone agrees on that, including Pornhub. Suggesting all payments on the site should be dropped is, however, callous and myopic.
"This is something we in the industry have known about for a long time, but often the trafficking or child porn headlines will drown out our voices," cam model Mary Moody told me. "We saw a similar issue unfold under SESTA/FOSTA when survival or full-service sex workers were unable to verify through Backpage and had to move to the more risky street-based work, where a disproportionate amount of minority groups are arrested."
Porn performers have dealt with de-platforming and discriminatory payment processing practices from the beginning of the internet and beyond, but have always adapted, finding new ways to continue their work. But if two of the biggest credit card companies in the world can choose to deny service to Pornhub—a household name for online porn—some worry that nothing's stopping them from denying service to smaller platforms, too.
"Pornhub/Mindgeek are a huge company with far more resources than most online platforms—if they can be shut down or hurt by this campaign, what hope is there for smaller platforms?" model Avalon Fey said. "By targeting Pornhub and successfully destroying the ability for independent creators to monetize their content, they have made it easier to remove payment options from smaller platforms too. This has nothing to do with helping abused victims, and everything to do with hurting online adult entertainers to stop them from creating and sharing adult content."
Many adult content creators make an income through several outlets, using a combination of clip sites, live streaming, subscription platforms, and independent websites, depending on what works for them. In the two years performer, Vinnie O'Neill has been in the adult industry, Pornhub and Modelhub have been his best-performing platform in terms of revenue and followers. Now, he’s worried that will all change.
“Sex workers are scared by this change, despite not having uploaded any illegal content”
"Visa and MasterCard have actually been hurting our ability to make money long before they banned Pornhub from their payment networks," O'Neill said. "For years, content creators have been suffering from having their content deleted because companies like Visa and MasterCard, through policies that constantly change, ban certain words and types of adult content."
During an unprecedented economic downturn and lack of support from the government, sites like OnlyFans have exploded in growth, as people turn to sex work to pay the bills. Dylan Thomas, an amateur performer, told me that after coming out as trans and facing discrimination and harassment in his former career, as well as a decrease in regular income from the pandemic, he chose to start modeling on Pornhub to make money. "Now Mastercard and Visa are essentially for lack of a better term cock-blocking my potential to generate income through Pornhub and Modelhub," he said. "I am watching to see if my OnlyFans will be their next target and sincerely hoping not."
Sex workers are often the most vocal, constructive critics of the platforms they use, and many have been trying to get Pornhub to change its unverified upload policies for years. Six months ago, adult model Ginger Banks started a petition specifically to ask Pornhub to change its upload policies to make them safer. No one wants sexual abuse imagery to proliferate on the internet, let alone on a site they use every day for income. But Pornhub's policy shift seems to have come too late.
"Pornhub has operated like the wild wild west, allowing pirated content which sometimes is non-consensual content," performer Allie Eve Knox said in a Twitter thread about the news. "Some of that content stays up for way too long after takedown requests, super problematic, and potentially harmful. None of us like that this happens and we have spoken out about how to fix these issues for years," she wrote.
As flawed as Pornhub is, many are also asking why sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which have reported millions of more instances of non-consensual abusive imagery, aren't targeted the way porn sites are. Facebook alone reported 84 million instances of child sexual abuse material over the last three years.
"Of course, no one will petition for those social media sites to be taken down—because people are more concerned about porn and sex work than anything else,” performer Gwen Adora, who has also been outspoken about conservative lobbyists' efforts against porn, told me earlier this year.
Payment processors have been censoring sex workers for years, by banning adult platforms from hosting certain types of porn, such as blood play, urine, and sleeping—or by closing individual bank accounts altogether. Pulling support from a massive porn network, however, is different.
"Sex workers are scared by this change, despite not having uploaded any illegal content," Fey said, "because we have seen these patterns before and have had sites and payment processors permanently and unexpectedly shut down." //
In addition to that, I wanted to share a Twitter by Asa Akira and her words are just lovely and true about the current situation.
She added the following thread to this
//"What’s happening to Pornhub is not a war on Pornhub, sexual abuse, or child trafficking; it’s a war on sex work. These supposed “activists” are rightwing, anti-porn, anti-feminist, anti-sex workgroups using unfortunate situations victims have had to endure, to push their own agenda.
They donate millions, head campaigns to better the world (not just in areas of human sexuality, but also the environment, feminism, etc.), and are proudly supported by much of mainstream media. If they can be taken down by such hate - who is next? How are we, as an industry, safe?
whether it be social media platforms treating us with extreme bias, politicians attempting to (and succeeding) in passing measures that further put us in danger, or evangelist groups trying to shut us down under the guise of “saving the children” like in this particular instance.
Pornhub is the only big media platform that has human moderators screening every video before publishing - a fact that is highlighted in the data that Facebook has had 84 MILLION cases of Child Sexual Abuse Material reported in the last 3 years, and Pornhub has had 118. Total.
They have always worked with the authority to catch these sick predators and continue to search for ways to better prevent such videos from seeing the light of day. Recently, they banned and deleted ALL uploads from non-verified users.
Thank u for reading all of this. I will always continue to live as my true horny self, and I will never give up on my right to do so. But I am scared.
One thing all of these fights have in common, is that they are always led - dishonestly - in the name of “activism.” Please, I beg of you, do not be fooled by this.
Again, if even they are not safe - what does that mean for adult work?? I am most saddened because Pornhub has unapologetically stood as allies and defenders of us sex workers when so many companies we work with have not.
In the time I’ve been in porn, there has not been a single moment we sex workers have been free of this war;
What’s scarier this time around for me - compared to any of the times before - is that Pornhub is arguably the biggest, most mainstream company our industry has ever seen. They are a household name and have done more than any other company in the past to normalize sex work.
I hope Visa and MasterCard see the harm they are doing to sex workers and the porn industry, but I’m not hopeful; they’ve never been our allies, and I doubt they will start now. It’s a very sad, disheartening time... but I can’t really say any of it is brand new."//
Again, this is what she said on her Twitter account and I believe she spoke for millions of workers in the industry. You can find her Twitter Account right here Asa Akira.
I had to reshare this and had to make a post about it because I am a supporter that everyone is being treated equally, fairly, and that we all experience the same rights and justice as we deserve because we are all humans.
If you want to support the industry and this post as well, please share it, and make it aware.
Thank you,
Lovely.
